JetBrains / AI powered IDE

[VR]

Hi Wolfgang,

since working on a new c# Backend + React Frontend Project, I started using Jetbrains Rider because it supports both c# and react projects. All Jetbrains IDEs use IntelliJ as core component and extend the necessary functionality using plugins. In the case of Rider, they use their other dotnet product, Resharper to handle all the c# parsing, refactoring, ... Then they also included the WebStorm plugins for JS/TS/... support and the DataGrip plugins for database management.

Another example is RustRover, their Rust IDE. That one started as an open-source plugin for the CLion Ide (https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust) but later became a standalone IDE.

I guess that it would be possible to integrate x# into rider, but only with the support of jetbrains. Rider relies heavily on Resharper for all the c# parsing and refactoring. But they also needed to reimplement some of Visual Studios designers like the Winforms or WPF Designer. That is the reason why these designers are not as good as in visual studio (for example some third party integrations like DevExpress sometimes don't work in Rider). Since these designers are closed source, having jetbrains on board would imho be critcal.

All that said, let's talk about the Jetbrains AI features. They have three separate plugins, that implement their AI integration:
* AI Assistant: comparable to Copilot chat (supports a lot of models like Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, ...)
* Junie: their AI agent, that takes a request, makes a plan, then starts to execute that plan
* Claude agent: Based on the Claude Agend SDK in collaboration with Anthropic

The AI Assistant is deeply integrated at various points in the IDE, like a button to generate a commit message, a button to create a code review of the changed files in the commit, a button in the log output to explain an exceptions, ... this is imho the biggest advantage of JetBrains AI, as other plugins often are limited to a chat window or an agent.
A weak point is the "intelligent completion" while typing, which very slow. This is a problem for some, but other don't like this feature anyway,

They normally give 3 AI credits for free each month, which is enougth if you use the AI Assistent from time to time and don't use the most expensive models.

Most of the Jetbrains IDEs offer a 30 Day trial and some of them are also free for non comercial use. So it's best to give it a try.

Volkmar

[Fabrice]

Hi Volkmar andWolfgang,

Intellij (so I suppose Rider) can be expanded with a plugin to use Ollama : Then you are using a local model, no need to worry about AI Credits, but to be smooth, you will need a fast and "artificially intelligent" computer.

I don't have more experience with Intellij (our school has a Ultimate university subscription so AI is included), but I've used the same configuration with Continue+Ollama in VSCode and it was nice (sometimes slow !)

HTH

[wriedmann]

Hi Volkmar,
thank you very much for your explanations - they helped me a lot.
As first step I will see if my PHP collegues are able to work with PHPStorm, and if they are succesful, and happy with the AI integration, maybe also using Ollama as Fabrice suggests, I will take the next step.
Even if I think I'm a decent programmer, a productivity boost by AI could be neccessary in the next years to be able to survive as programmer.
Wolfgang

[mindfulvector]

I happen to have started working on just such a plugin for XIDE which can use either Ollama or other backend LLM drivers such as Claude. I haven't gotten very far with it quite yet due to other concerns at work having much higher priority, but I will be sure to release it if I can get it into a useful state. For now, I mostly use Cline with VSCode when I want to do some work that could benefit from LLM use such as large amounts of boilerplate implementation. The Cline extension also has a backend driver system and can be used with many providers.

As an aside: PHPStorm is excellent; I used it extensively at a previous job. Although it can be slow on large codebases, I suspect your colleagues will like it very much if they give it a chance.