alt Hacker NewsI really can't understand why JetBrains hasn't integrated its refactoring tools into the AI system. Really missed the boat on making their platform transformational for AI coding. Imagine how much smaller the context would be for a tool that renames a function than editing hundreds of files. This LSP support is a good start but without the mutation functions it is still pretty lackluster. Plus LSPs aren't as good as JetBrains generally.
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Jetbrainz needs to give up on Junie and their in house ai and focus on integrating with the established tools. If they don’t, VS code will consume them.
When you become complacent and your ego isn’t checked, you think you have the hottest thing. Hubris is hard. They had a pretty big moat that they let vscode eat away at. I don’t think they saw any of this coming and are struggling to make sense of it.
It really does feel like the Innovator's Dilemma playing out for JetBrains. They have the best semantic understanding of code (PSI) locked away in their proprietary engine, but they seem too attached to the traditional "human-driving-the-IDE" paradigm.
Tools like Claude Code (and Cursor) are treating the editor/CLI as a fluid canvas for the AI, whereas JetBrains treats AI as just a sidebar plugin. If they don't expose their internal refactoring tools to agents soon, the friction of switching to VS Code/CLI becomes negligible compared to the productivity gains of these agents.
I completely agree. Likewise I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done it themselves for Roslyn and Copilot. Roslyn analyzers are so incredibly powerful, and it's being ignored.
An explainer for others:
Not only can analyzers act as basic linters, but transformations are built right in to them. Every time claude does search-and-replace to add a parameter I want to cry a little, this has been a solved science.
Agents + Roslyn would be productive like little else. Imagine an agent as an orchestrator but manipulation through commands to an API that maintains guard rails and compilability.
Claude is already capable of writing roslyn analyzers, and roslyn has an API for implementing code transformations ( so called "quick fixes" ), so they already are out there in library form.
It's hard to describe them to anyone who hasn't used a similarly powerful system, but essentially it enables transforms that go way beyond simple find/replace. You get accurate transformations that can be quite complex and deep reworks to the code itself.
A simple example would be transforming a foreach loop into a for loop, or transforming and optimizing linq statements.
And yet we find these tools unused with agentic find/replace doing the heavy lifting instead.
Whichever AI company solves LSP and compiler based deep refactoring will see their utility shoot through the roof for working with large codebases.
I think they are completely screwing up the AI integration.
After years of JetBrains PyCharm pro I'm seriously considering switch to cursor. Before supermaven being acquired, pycharm+supermaven was feeling like having superpowers ... i really wish they will manage to somehow catch up, otherwise the path is written: crisis, being acquired by some big corp, enshitification.
They wanted to, but they’re still waiting for the IDE itself to simply load.
there is a jetbrains MCP server that gives Claude Code access to this sort of thing, but I think its still fairly jank and bloats context.
People keep saying how amazing IntelliJ is at refactoring, but then you realize the talk about "rename thing" and "extract function".
This is 5% of what refactoring is, the rest is big scale re-architecting code where these tools are useless.
The agents can do this big scale architecturing if you describe exactly what you want.
IntelliJ has no moat here, because they can do well 5% of what refactoring is.
Jetbrains seems a bit lost these days. Look at that very recent screw up [0].
I thought about moving after 10+ years when they abandoned the commit modal, and jacked up the plan prices, but I barely understand how to commit things in Vscode anyway. Let's see in 2026.
[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/datagrip/2025/12/18/query-console...