6 ms·

JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

225 points by przemub 1y ago

gitroom 1y ago
ugh that whole review thing is super sketchy, i really don't get how they think that builds any trust
terminalbraid 1y ago
> The spokesperson added that the company could have done better They seem to have to say that a lot about this product, yet they don't really seem to learn any lessons. When the original flood of bad reviews came it it was because they made that plugin bundled with the IDE and then had a "bug" where it couldn't be effectively removed. There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. They then walked that back with the same "we could have done better". This is more of the same. The "AI Assistant" still lives on the default side bar regardless if you have that plugin installed or not. At this point, they know they could do better yet are choosing not to.
- mystified5016 1y ago
  The only way to actually uninstall it is to manually rip out the files from your installation. It's nuts.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. this is so disappointing from jetbrains... it seems recently their actions are less and less user/customer friendly...
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    For me that started with Kotlin. Not only are they quite open it is a means to cash in more InteliJ licenses, the community has generally an anti-Java sentiment, especially on Android, as if it doesn't depend on the ecosystem for its own existence. The language might have a great design, however for me that is off-putting and makes me rather play with other JVM languages, like Clojure. "The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin." https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-needs-kotlin/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - andrekandre 1y ago
      > The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. wow, i literally had no idea about that... thanks for the info (T_T)
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Not a good look. A better way would’ve been to add a response to the reviews (and notify the reviewers via eg email): “Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”
- serial_dev 1y ago
  But that would be a lot of work and the damned user could reply or update their review that “it still doesn’t work and my review still stands”. If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    Any company that thinks it's too costly to respond to paying customers better have a really good ads product or airtight enterprise licensing deals. Because that's the only type of revenue stream where you can get away with ignoring the user.
pandemic_region 1y ago
The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?
- toyg 1y ago
  > it was just a lightning fast Java code editor Uh, I don't think it's ever been "lightning fast"... Great at refactoring, navigation, and boilerplate generation, yeah; fast, no.
  - delusional 1y ago
    It was actually known as the fast option. You have to remember that this was from a time where the alternatives were Eclipse and NetBeans. Lightweight vim/emacs style "text editor" IDE's (maybe except for hardcore configuration heavy plugin collections) hadn't come around yet.
    - toyg 1y ago
      I guess if you compared it to those two, it definitely was faster ("lightning" though, really?). TBH, at the time, for Java I was happily using the likes of jEdit with a bunch of plugins, and for Microsoft stuff I had Visual Studio. Those editors were fast; IDEA had many advantages in comparison, but definitely not speed for me.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Timon3 1y ago
  This has also been my experience. Every update brings new weird bugs that disrupt my workflow - it's gotten bad enough that I've stopped updating their tools when the bugs aren't in main parts of my workflow, because while updates may fix those, they are sure to introduce even worse ones. And it's not like I'm doing crazy stuff, for a while even copying text made a "Copying..." dialog pop up and freeze the editor for a while. Unless something drastically changes, I won't be renewing my license anymore. I don't like VS Code, but it's been much more reliable than the Jetbrains tools I use.
ziddoap 1y ago
>a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable signal. Preferably, they would reply to reviews and say "XYZ was addressed in update ABC" or something. Nuking reviews is a valuable signal as well, I guess. Just not in the way that they hope. Knowing that they've done that has (further) lowered my impression of them.
- willcipriano 1y ago
  "This thing is expensive and it barely works" "We fixed yesterday's outage, review removed"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lolinder 1y ago
  Yes, it's a terrible excuse, and it's concerning that they think it's a good one. I highly doubt that they make a habit of fielding requests from plugin authors to nuke outdated reviews: you simply can't scale the verification that would require to do honestly. If they don't offer this as an option to others then this move is wrong both for the reasons you give and because they're claiming a privilege in their app store that they won't afford to their competition.
  - kevincox 1y ago
    I don't think that they think it is a good one. It was just the best excuse they could come up with after being caught. The "good idea" was to remove the reviews without anybody noticing.
    - mystified5016 1y ago
      They sent emails notifying people that their comments were removed. They weren't exactly trying very hard to be sly.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Deleted comment cited by the author: “ I previously submitted a review critiquing this plugin, but it was removed by JetBrains moderation — an unfortunate decision that, in my view, undermines trust in open feedback. I have now tested the latest AI plugin (v243.23654.270.16). The plugin does offer limited support for third-party providers like Ollama and LM Studio (the latter being a better fit for most local LLM users). However, this support is restricted to chat interactions only — not to autocomplete, inline suggestions, or in-editor refactoring tools. In practice, this limitation significantly reduces the plugin’s value for users who already maintain ChatGPT Pro accounts or local LLM workflows. Rather than fully enabling local model integration, the design seems oriented toward promoting JetBrains’ proprietary cloud models and subscription services. Specific ratings: • Integration with IDE: 5 stars — Excellent UI integration into JetBrains products, smooth setup. • Performance: 1 star — Noticeable latency compared to local models; frequent delays. • Available Features: 1 star — Limited flexibility for serious LLM users; core features locked to cloud services. • User Interface: 1 star — Chat feels bolted-on rather than deeply native; inconsistent UX across project types. • Documentation Quality: 1 star — The documentation exists but feels sparse, with limited guidance on third-party setup and unclear disclosures about feature limitations. While some users may find the plugin sufficient for lightweight AI chat, in my assessment, it falls short both in technical flexibility and in respecting user choice. Thank you to JetBrains for providing the opportunity to share my neutral and unbiased observations with fellow developers” [1]. [1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22282-jetbrains-ai-assistant/reviews#116867 https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22282-jetbrains-ai-assi...
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  …why can’t I edit this 9-minute old comment for formatting? @dang
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Apparently some accounts can have their edit window muzzled if a moderator chooses to. I have a reduced 10 minute edit window that was applied to my account without notice or explanation, it's fully possible that you might have one too.
endofreach 1y ago
Not great. Any other company would have been put on my greedy-morons list. But i believe JetBrains is special and is allowed more mistakes than others. I also believe they should really stay calm and not get sucked into the AI hype. Worst case they will be the heroes to the people who like to program for the joy of it, in case these AI IDEs should really take over (which i highly doubt).
- homebrewer 1y ago
  Their main target market are enterprise Java developers, whose intersection with "people who like to program for the joy of it" is close to zero. Lately they've also been coddling with the VSCode crowd by aggressively pushing the new UI over loud objections of old loyal users. Either one seems like direct opposite of the hacker user you're mentioning.
  - dullcrisp 1y ago
    Also people who like good IDEs. But we know that real hackers use emacs.
    - sadjad 1y ago
      Real hackers use butterflies.
  - misswaterfairy 1y ago
    Python developers as well. PyCharm is pretty much unrivalled in my view.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
chuckadams 1y ago
Junie is a much better agent than the AI Assistant and uses the same AI subscription plan, but Augment blows the doors off both of them.
- nicolaslem 1y ago
  I never managed to get anything out of Junie. Each of my queries end up with an internal process stuck on a loop eating 100% CPU until I kill it. Back to Windsurf for now which is disappointing because I much prefer PyCharm for everything else.
  - ianlevesque 1y ago
    Results quality is probably language-dependent. I was able to use Junie to do a bunch of Java/Kotlin tasks and it worked very well.
- dygd 1y ago
  I didn't know what Augment is, so I checked it out. There's absolute no way I'm going to agree to this [0]: > When you open a workspace with Augment enabled, your codebase will be automatically uploaded to Augment’s secure cloud. [0] https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspace-indexing#about-indexing-your-workspace https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspa...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zer0-c00l 1y ago
I love JetBrains and hate vscode, but Cursor was such a huge productivity boost that I ended up switching. Unfortunately none of the JetBrains plugins (Junie, the older AI Assistant, Windsurf/codeium, etc) come close yet :(
- roegerle 1y ago
  The subscription costs are worth it?
  - fred123 1y ago
    It’s just $20, that’s almost free compared to cost of human labor
  - bb88 1y ago
    Depends mostly upon what you're doing. Having done go and python in jetbrains and vscode, I definitely enjoy the experience in jetbrains more. A lot of java people like IntelliJ for their Java and Kotlin support. OTOH, copilot has been not as good on Jetbrains as it has been on vscode. Updates are delayed to give VSCode a first mover advantage to VSCode. Google Gemini Code assist plugin last week still sucked, didn't try it today. Copilot can also use Gemini Pro 2.5, but they delayed the release of the plugin for Jetbrains, and only have a context of 10 files I believe for the edit mode. And I thought I read somewhere that Jetbrains AI Assistant can use gemini AI pro, it's limited to a context window of 200,000. I might be wrong on that. Junie is reasonably good, but still has issues with understanding large code blocks of more than a couple of kilobytes. But it applies the changes first, without letting you do a review of the code. The only real way to do it, is to check in the code in git, then let it run, and then look at the results. I've asked Junie to fix unit tests using brave mode, and it seems more than capable with that. I think the trick with Junie is small defined tasks, rather than large bullet points. Or at least have a detailed plan which you can paste in, and reasonably detailed so it won't have to guess or infer what it is you want. But generally speaking, I've had far better luck with Google Gemini Pro 2.5 on code generation than with some of the others lately. Edited to add: Github Copilot added agent mode. I'm going to try it now.
  - 1y ago
xyst 1y ago
I used to be a fan of jb products since they used to give it out for free in college, and continued using it into my professional career (I loved the refactoring tools!). However, lately they have been adding too much junk to their IDEs. Have switched to my very old workflow of using nvim and customizing it with NvChad.
reactordev 1y ago
The correct approach, IMO, is to try to incentivize re-review after the issues have been fixed. Not delete the negative reviews. If you want to prove you're customer centric with your product and that you actually care, you can find a way to encourage them to change their vote.
buybackoff 1y ago
I'm really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work/personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by existing users.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  I even tried, when my old work-paid CoPilot subscription expired, to use a paid membership for their AI tool. It was so-so, but I was happy to give them money. And then my modest use for my personal open source project hit their monthly limit. So I just went back to CoPilot. I know they don't have deep pockets, but, like you, I'd rather they just spend it on making a good tool.
- Latty 1y ago
  Yeah, I cancelled my subscription when it became clear they just did not care about my custom any more. The core products had pain points just sat with open issues forever, and they just started doing nothing but trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't care about or want. I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's really sad seeing that devolve into the same mess of "you are the product" as virtually everything else, despite the fact they were still demanding my money.
  - buybackoff 1y ago
    Just to be clear: JB have been and still are so ahead in ergonomics that I still cannot imagine going back to VS and I will renew my personal one without any doubt. For now. I just question their priorities.
  - rom16384 1y ago
    I've also cancelled my Intellij Ultimate subscription, because I feel Jetbrains lost its direction. They've made the classic interface a plugin and replaced it with a VSCode lookalike, and didn't have an integrated AI assistant that accepts your own API key. I'm ok with them selling their own AI subscriptions but let me use AI autocomplete on my pro subscription without further charges as long as I supply the LLM model API.
buremba 1y ago
They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI. Not sure why it’s so hard for them to catch up with Cursor. They have everything they need but somehow they focus on just something that they don’t have much expertise, building models instead of better integration. It’s a shame seeing such good product going downhill considering AI is becoming fundamental for dev productivity.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nojs 1y ago
  They’re in a difficult position because half their users want more AI but the other half complain loudly when it’s forced on them. Cursor is beating them because they can deeply embed AI everywhere without worrying about this.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
    The classic disruption of a startup. This is actually a good thing. This allows new startups to come into the market.
  - unfunco 1y ago
    That's not a difficult position at all, just make it an opt-in feature.
    - nojs 1y ago
      That’s what they’re evidently trying to do, but it means they’re moving too slow and the AI integration feels like a bolted on afterthought (hence the reaction to failed features like this). I am a lifetime user of PyCharm but the reality is that Cursor is just so much more productive now. “Junie” is a decent attempt but nowhere close to Cursor yet.
mrlonglong 1y ago
First thing I do with any jetbrain ide is kill that ai assistant. I'm paid to think.
unfunco 1y ago
I cancelled my JetBrains license a few days ago after I was required to agree to new terms and conditions, they expended no effort and took zero time to explain the changes, what has changed and why, I was shown a ridiculously long legal document and asked to agree or get fucked. There was no feedback option when cancelling the subscription, they clearly don't care.
- persavon 1y ago
  Didn’t you read the ridiculously long legal document and agreed to it when you got the license in the beginning as well?
  - dankwizard 1y ago
    I asked ChatGPT to give me the 1 line summary
    - andrekandre 1y ago
      what did it day?
      - grg0 1y ago
        "bandoongle"
  - unfunco 1y ago
    Probably not in all honesty, I cared less back in 2014 when I started using their IDEs.
terminalbraid 1y ago
The second a better product comes along I'm moving away from Jetbrains. Unfortunately I think we're about to get into an IDE winter since everything thinks all problems should just be solved by AI rather than doing the hard work like "good refactoring tools" and "acceptable user experience".
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
  Even without AI winter, I don't know how you can catch up to intellij. Vscode is a hodge podge of dubious quality plugins by randos. I'm sure you can build yourself a nice IDE by being very selective, but part of what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness, and I think you need a big player that is invested in building something for a large variety of use cases. I think Microsoft has their own set of tooling that works for them at their company and so does Apple and I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. Any small scale startup will take many years to catch up.
  - freeone3000 1y ago
    Microsoft uses a mixture of Visual Studio (classic) and VSCode internally. The AI assistant is Copilot. The exact same stuff that the users use, albeit slightly buggier. To get the True Microsoft Experience, take VSCode, install the Git, GitHub, Azure, Typescript, and Copilot plugins, and disable third-party repos. A cohesive IDE!
  - terminalbraid 1y ago
    > what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness Seriously. This is where Jetbrains went astray. Their original programmers I think were pretty high quality, but their product people are clearly so pants-on-head clueless that they wouldn't know a golden goose if it crushed them under metric tons of golden eggs. Good things don't power-law scale and "let's make 1000 forked IDEs and 50 really weird infrastructure servers" isn't a winning strategy. It's how you bury yourself in tech debt. > I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. I mean, that's what launched Jetbrains in the first place. Google needed proper development tools for Android and a language more modern than Java at the time to support it. So we got Android Studio and Kotlin. They dumped a bunch of money into them and this is what we got once they started to get more independent.
tacker2000 1y ago
There is already a huge discussion going on about their big re-design last year, so I guess they are now feeling the burn with all the users leaving...
ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
Yeah, unfortunately, they have to jump on the AI bandwagon because they are forced to by other editors, providing free AI, but they simply do not have the skills to integrate the AI properly. It's a shame, and unfortunately removing negative reviews will not help as people will simply migrate to a different product. You can have three 5 star reviews, but that doesn't help if nobody else is using it.
steve-atx-7600 1y ago
Confirmed - it is an expensive turd. Windsurf IntelliJ plugin is better and faster at auto complete and has useful interactive natural langue interaction based coding features.
- ssousa666 1y ago
  I have been using this pairing for the past eighteen months and it has been a very productive and smooth experience. The Codeium/Windsurf JB IDE plugin is much better than their standalone vscode fork IDE
wolvesechoes 1y ago
Soon we will have to pay premium to not have AI Assistants in our tools.
good-luck86523 1y ago
Everyone is rigging reviews. Welcome to capitalism.
- explodes 1y ago
  Right? Are 3rd-Party Plugin developers allowed to ask for old negative reviews to be deleted? I would guess that no, you cannot request that, because Jet Brains are overstepping their position. I would LOVE to see a paid plugin challenge Jet Brains on this by asking that their old negative reviews get deleted under threat of legal action.
T3RMINATED 1y ago
[dead]
qiu3344 1y ago
It's quite shocking to me how many people already told me to disable the annoying "single line" AI-completion if I ever were to try out a JetBrains IDE. > AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month If it's so expensive, why do they force it on everyone? Sure, a lot of folks want support for this, but enabling it by default is just annoying for their long-time users. Not to mention the costs of full AI-completion, I hope they don't get the idea of also enabling that by default.
cnbeining 1y ago
IANAL but is this even legal despite recent curb on FTC? [0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
ingvar77 1y ago
From consumer perspective, I’m actually not against this probably. Would be nice to have way to give more weight to reviews relevant to current product version. Old reviews are very confusing for consumers since they basically provide false information about the product.
Pesthuf 1y ago
Do third party plugin authors get this privilege, to remove reviews where they deem the mentioned issues solved?
tdiff 1y ago
Noone would care in a week

225 points by przemub 1y ago

ugh that whole review thing is super sketchy, i really don't get how they think that builds any trust

> The spokesperson added that the company could have done better They seem to have to say that a lot about this product, yet they don't really seem to learn any lessons. When the original flood of bad reviews came it it was because they made that plugin bundled with the IDE and then had a "bug" where it couldn't be effectively removed. There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. They then walked that back with the same "we could have done better". This is more of the same. The "AI Assistant" still lives on the default side bar regardless if you have that plugin installed or not. At this point, they know they could do better yet are choosing not to.

mystified5016 1y ago
The only way to actually uninstall it is to manually rip out the files from your installation. It's nuts.
andrekandre 1y ago
> There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. this is so disappointing from jetbrains... it seems recently their actions are less and less user/customer friendly...
- pjmlp 1y ago
  For me that started with Kotlin. Not only are they quite open it is a means to cash in more InteliJ licenses, the community has generally an anti-Java sentiment, especially on Android, as if it doesn't depend on the ecosystem for its own existence. The language might have a great design, however for me that is off-putting and makes me rather play with other JVM languages, like Clojure. "The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin." https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-needs-kotlin/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    > The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. wow, i literally had no idea about that... thanks for the info (T_T)

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Not a good look. A better way would’ve been to add a response to the reviews (and notify the reviewers via eg email): “Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”

serial_dev 1y ago
But that would be a lot of work and the damned user could reply or update their review that “it still doesn’t work and my review still stands”. If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.
- rchaud 1y ago
  Any company that thinks it's too costly to respond to paying customers better have a really good ads product or airtight enterprise licensing deals. Because that's the only type of revenue stream where you can get away with ignoring the user.

pandemic_region 1y ago

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

toyg 1y ago
> it was just a lightning fast Java code editor Uh, I don't think it's ever been "lightning fast"... Great at refactoring, navigation, and boilerplate generation, yeah; fast, no.
- delusional 1y ago
  It was actually known as the fast option. You have to remember that this was from a time where the alternatives were Eclipse and NetBeans. Lightweight vim/emacs style "text editor" IDE's (maybe except for hardcore configuration heavy plugin collections) hadn't come around yet.
  - toyg 1y ago
    I guess if you compared it to those two, it definitely was faster ("lightning" though, really?). TBH, at the time, for Java I was happily using the likes of jEdit with a bunch of plugins, and for Microsoft stuff I had Visual Studio. Those editors were fast; IDEA had many advantages in comparison, but definitely not speed for me.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Timon3 1y ago
This has also been my experience. Every update brings new weird bugs that disrupt my workflow - it's gotten bad enough that I've stopped updating their tools when the bugs aren't in main parts of my workflow, because while updates may fix those, they are sure to introduce even worse ones. And it's not like I'm doing crazy stuff, for a while even copying text made a "Copying..." dialog pop up and freeze the editor for a while. Unless something drastically changes, I won't be renewing my license anymore. I don't like VS Code, but it's been much more reliable than the Jetbrains tools I use.

ziddoap 1y ago

>a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable signal. Preferably, they would reply to reviews and say "XYZ was addressed in update ABC" or something. Nuking reviews is a valuable signal as well, I guess. Just not in the way that they hope. Knowing that they've done that has (further) lowered my impression of them.

willcipriano 1y ago
"This thing is expensive and it barely works" "We fixed yesterday's outage, review removed"
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 1y ago
Yes, it's a terrible excuse, and it's concerning that they think it's a good one. I highly doubt that they make a habit of fielding requests from plugin authors to nuke outdated reviews: you simply can't scale the verification that would require to do honestly. If they don't offer this as an option to others then this move is wrong both for the reasons you give and because they're claiming a privilege in their app store that they won't afford to their competition.
- kevincox 1y ago
  I don't think that they think it is a good one. It was just the best excuse they could come up with after being caught. The "good idea" was to remove the reviews without anybody noticing.
  - mystified5016 1y ago
    They sent emails notifying people that their comments were removed. They weren't exactly trying very hard to be sly.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

Deleted comment cited by the author: “ I previously submitted a review critiquing this plugin, but it was removed by JetBrains moderation — an unfortunate decision that, in my view, undermines trust in open feedback. I have now tested the latest AI plugin (v243.23654.270.16). The plugin does offer limited support for third-party providers like Ollama and LM Studio (the latter being a better fit for most local LLM users). However, this support is restricted to chat interactions only — not to autocomplete, inline suggestions, or in-editor refactoring tools. In practice, this limitation significantly reduces the plugin’s value for users who already maintain ChatGPT Pro accounts or local LLM workflows. Rather than fully enabling local model integration, the design seems oriented toward promoting JetBrains’ proprietary cloud models and subscription services. Specific ratings: • Integration with IDE: 5 stars — Excellent UI integration into JetBrains products, smooth setup. • Performance: 1 star — Noticeable latency compared to local models; frequent delays. • Available Features: 1 star — Limited flexibility for serious LLM users; core features locked to cloud services. • User Interface: 1 star — Chat feels bolted-on rather than deeply native; inconsistent UX across project types. • Documentation Quality: 1 star — The documentation exists but feels sparse, with limited guidance on third-party setup and unclear disclosures about feature limitations. While some users may find the plugin sufficient for lightweight AI chat, in my assessment, it falls short both in technical flexibility and in respecting user choice. Thank you to JetBrains for providing the opportunity to share my neutral and unbiased observations with fellow developers” [1]. [1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22282-jetbrains-ai-assistant/reviews#116867 https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22282-jetbrains-ai-assi...

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
…why can’t I edit this 9-minute old comment for formatting? @dang
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Apparently some accounts can have their edit window muzzled if a moderator chooses to. I have a reduced 10 minute edit window that was applied to my account without notice or explanation, it's fully possible that you might have one too.

endofreach 1y ago

Not great. Any other company would have been put on my greedy-morons list. But i believe JetBrains is special and is allowed more mistakes than others. I also believe they should really stay calm and not get sucked into the AI hype. Worst case they will be the heroes to the people who like to program for the joy of it, in case these AI IDEs should really take over (which i highly doubt).

homebrewer 1y ago
Their main target market are enterprise Java developers, whose intersection with "people who like to program for the joy of it" is close to zero. Lately they've also been coddling with the VSCode crowd by aggressively pushing the new UI over loud objections of old loyal users. Either one seems like direct opposite of the hacker user you're mentioning.
- dullcrisp 1y ago
  Also people who like good IDEs. But we know that real hackers use emacs.
  - sadjad 1y ago
    Real hackers use butterflies.
- misswaterfairy 1y ago
  Python developers as well. PyCharm is pretty much unrivalled in my view.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

chuckadams 1y ago

Junie is a much better agent than the AI Assistant and uses the same AI subscription plan, but Augment blows the doors off both of them.

nicolaslem 1y ago
I never managed to get anything out of Junie. Each of my queries end up with an internal process stuck on a loop eating 100% CPU until I kill it. Back to Windsurf for now which is disappointing because I much prefer PyCharm for everything else.
- ianlevesque 1y ago
  Results quality is probably language-dependent. I was able to use Junie to do a bunch of Java/Kotlin tasks and it worked very well.
dygd 1y ago
I didn't know what Augment is, so I checked it out. There's absolute no way I'm going to agree to this [0]: > When you open a workspace with Augment enabled, your codebase will be automatically uploaded to Augment’s secure cloud. [0] https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspace-indexing#about-indexing-your-workspace https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspa...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zer0-c00l 1y ago

I love JetBrains and hate vscode, but Cursor was such a huge productivity boost that I ended up switching. Unfortunately none of the JetBrains plugins (Junie, the older AI Assistant, Windsurf/codeium, etc) come close yet :(

roegerle 1y ago
The subscription costs are worth it?
- fred123 1y ago
  It’s just $20, that’s almost free compared to cost of human labor
- bb88 1y ago
  Depends mostly upon what you're doing. Having done go and python in jetbrains and vscode, I definitely enjoy the experience in jetbrains more. A lot of java people like IntelliJ for their Java and Kotlin support. OTOH, copilot has been not as good on Jetbrains as it has been on vscode. Updates are delayed to give VSCode a first mover advantage to VSCode. Google Gemini Code assist plugin last week still sucked, didn't try it today. Copilot can also use Gemini Pro 2.5, but they delayed the release of the plugin for Jetbrains, and only have a context of 10 files I believe for the edit mode. And I thought I read somewhere that Jetbrains AI Assistant can use gemini AI pro, it's limited to a context window of 200,000. I might be wrong on that. Junie is reasonably good, but still has issues with understanding large code blocks of more than a couple of kilobytes. But it applies the changes first, without letting you do a review of the code. The only real way to do it, is to check in the code in git, then let it run, and then look at the results. I've asked Junie to fix unit tests using brave mode, and it seems more than capable with that. I think the trick with Junie is small defined tasks, rather than large bullet points. Or at least have a detailed plan which you can paste in, and reasonably detailed so it won't have to guess or infer what it is you want. But generally speaking, I've had far better luck with Google Gemini Pro 2.5 on code generation than with some of the others lately. Edited to add: Github Copilot added agent mode. I'm going to try it now.
- 1y ago

xyst 1y ago

I used to be a fan of jb products since they used to give it out for free in college, and continued using it into my professional career (I loved the refactoring tools!). However, lately they have been adding too much junk to their IDEs. Have switched to my very old workflow of using nvim and customizing it with NvChad.

reactordev 1y ago

The correct approach, IMO, is to try to incentivize re-review after the issues have been fixed. Not delete the negative reviews. If you want to prove you're customer centric with your product and that you actually care, you can find a way to encourage them to change their vote.

buybackoff 1y ago

I'm really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work/personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by existing users.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
I even tried, when my old work-paid CoPilot subscription expired, to use a paid membership for their AI tool. It was so-so, but I was happy to give them money. And then my modest use for my personal open source project hit their monthly limit. So I just went back to CoPilot. I know they don't have deep pockets, but, like you, I'd rather they just spend it on making a good tool.
Latty 1y ago
Yeah, I cancelled my subscription when it became clear they just did not care about my custom any more. The core products had pain points just sat with open issues forever, and they just started doing nothing but trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't care about or want. I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's really sad seeing that devolve into the same mess of "you are the product" as virtually everything else, despite the fact they were still demanding my money.
- buybackoff 1y ago
  Just to be clear: JB have been and still are so ahead in ergonomics that I still cannot imagine going back to VS and I will renew my personal one without any doubt. For now. I just question their priorities.
- rom16384 1y ago
  I've also cancelled my Intellij Ultimate subscription, because I feel Jetbrains lost its direction. They've made the classic interface a plugin and replaced it with a VSCode lookalike, and didn't have an integrated AI assistant that accepts your own API key. I'm ok with them selling their own AI subscriptions but let me use AI autocomplete on my pro subscription without further charges as long as I supply the LLM model API.

buremba 1y ago

They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI. Not sure why it’s so hard for them to catch up with Cursor. They have everything they need but somehow they focus on just something that they don’t have much expertise, building models instead of better integration. It’s a shame seeing such good product going downhill considering AI is becoming fundamental for dev productivity.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nojs 1y ago
They’re in a difficult position because half their users want more AI but the other half complain loudly when it’s forced on them. Cursor is beating them because they can deeply embed AI everywhere without worrying about this.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
  The classic disruption of a startup. This is actually a good thing. This allows new startups to come into the market.
- unfunco 1y ago
  That's not a difficult position at all, just make it an opt-in feature.
  - nojs 1y ago
    That’s what they’re evidently trying to do, but it means they’re moving too slow and the AI integration feels like a bolted on afterthought (hence the reaction to failed features like this). I am a lifetime user of PyCharm but the reality is that Cursor is just so much more productive now. “Junie” is a decent attempt but nowhere close to Cursor yet.

mrlonglong 1y ago

First thing I do with any jetbrain ide is kill that ai assistant. I'm paid to think.

unfunco 1y ago

I cancelled my JetBrains license a few days ago after I was required to agree to new terms and conditions, they expended no effort and took zero time to explain the changes, what has changed and why, I was shown a ridiculously long legal document and asked to agree or get fucked. There was no feedback option when cancelling the subscription, they clearly don't care.

persavon 1y ago
Didn’t you read the ridiculously long legal document and agreed to it when you got the license in the beginning as well?
- dankwizard 1y ago
  I asked ChatGPT to give me the 1 line summary
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    what did it day?
    - grg0 1y ago
      "bandoongle"
- unfunco 1y ago
  Probably not in all honesty, I cared less back in 2014 when I started using their IDEs.

terminalbraid 1y ago

The second a better product comes along I'm moving away from Jetbrains. Unfortunately I think we're about to get into an IDE winter since everything thinks all problems should just be solved by AI rather than doing the hard work like "good refactoring tools" and "acceptable user experience".

8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
Even without AI winter, I don't know how you can catch up to intellij. Vscode is a hodge podge of dubious quality plugins by randos. I'm sure you can build yourself a nice IDE by being very selective, but part of what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness, and I think you need a big player that is invested in building something for a large variety of use cases. I think Microsoft has their own set of tooling that works for them at their company and so does Apple and I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. Any small scale startup will take many years to catch up.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  Microsoft uses a mixture of Visual Studio (classic) and VSCode internally. The AI assistant is Copilot. The exact same stuff that the users use, albeit slightly buggier. To get the True Microsoft Experience, take VSCode, install the Git, GitHub, Azure, Typescript, and Copilot plugins, and disable third-party repos. A cohesive IDE!
- terminalbraid 1y ago
  > what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness Seriously. This is where Jetbrains went astray. Their original programmers I think were pretty high quality, but their product people are clearly so pants-on-head clueless that they wouldn't know a golden goose if it crushed them under metric tons of golden eggs. Good things don't power-law scale and "let's make 1000 forked IDEs and 50 really weird infrastructure servers" isn't a winning strategy. It's how you bury yourself in tech debt. > I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. I mean, that's what launched Jetbrains in the first place. Google needed proper development tools for Android and a language more modern than Java at the time to support it. So we got Android Studio and Kotlin. They dumped a bunch of money into them and this is what we got once they started to get more independent.

tacker2000 1y ago

There is already a huge discussion going on about their big re-design last year, so I guess they are now feeling the burn with all the users leaving...

ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago

Yeah, unfortunately, they have to jump on the AI bandwagon because they are forced to by other editors, providing free AI, but they simply do not have the skills to integrate the AI properly. It's a shame, and unfortunately removing negative reviews will not help as people will simply migrate to a different product. You can have three 5 star reviews, but that doesn't help if nobody else is using it.

steve-atx-7600 1y ago

Confirmed - it is an expensive turd. Windsurf IntelliJ plugin is better and faster at auto complete and has useful interactive natural langue interaction based coding features.

ssousa666 1y ago
I have been using this pairing for the past eighteen months and it has been a very productive and smooth experience. The Codeium/Windsurf JB IDE plugin is much better than their standalone vscode fork IDE

wolvesechoes 1y ago

Soon we will have to pay premium to not have AI Assistants in our tools.

good-luck86523 1y ago

Everyone is rigging reviews. Welcome to capitalism.

explodes 1y ago
Right? Are 3rd-Party Plugin developers allowed to ask for old negative reviews to be deleted? I would guess that no, you cannot request that, because Jet Brains are overstepping their position. I would LOVE to see a paid plugin challenge Jet Brains on this by asking that their old negative reviews get deleted under threat of legal action.

T3RMINATED 1y ago

[dead]

qiu3344 1y ago

It's quite shocking to me how many people already told me to disable the annoying "single line" AI-completion if I ever were to try out a JetBrains IDE. > AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month If it's so expensive, why do they force it on everyone? Sure, a lot of folks want support for this, but enabling it by default is just annoying for their long-time users. Not to mention the costs of full AI-completion, I hope they don't get the idea of also enabling that by default.

cnbeining 1y ago

IANAL but is this even legal despite recent curb on FTC? [0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...

ingvar77 1y ago

From consumer perspective, I’m actually not against this probably. Would be nice to have way to give more weight to reviews relevant to current product version. Old reviews are very confusing for consumers since they basically provide false information about the product.

Pesthuf 1y ago

Do third party plugin authors get this privilege, to remove reviews where they deem the mentioned issues solved?

tdiff 1y ago

Noone would care in a week