alt Hacker NewsJetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
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An IDE connects a human coder to the development process. If the role of that coder changes in that process, the IDE connection is not going to be as heavy as it used to be.
I loved IntelliJ for Java, but I cancelled as I have been AI-pilled to never need to write code again.
They probably have very good financial cushions. One year of losses is nothing to a company like that.
I thought JetBrains is a private/bootstrapped company.
Where are these financials coming from?
Either a whole lot of money is about to be sucked out of markets or money is about to massively devalue. This is the bill coming due for the zero interest rate years, seen from one company's vantage point.
Software is changing. It would be a good time to invest rather than to focus on the bottom line. Their revenue is up.
I’m not surprised.
I don't have plans to stop using Jetbrains any time soon but I can't deny my satisfaction in their products has been declining for a couple of years. Still, nothing else is as good. I wish they'd spent a cycle or two on performance and bugs.
They only need to have some hundreds of billions of loss extra, and they might be the next big thing!
I am a long time JetBrains subscriber to the all products pack. Their response to recent AI events has been extremely lackluster and I've given them this feedback directly, in feedback and otherwise.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
What are they DOING?!?
LLM spending. Playing catchup
So VSCode is actually having an impact, most likely.
This is interesting to me because I only started using JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA specifically to do AI coding.
It was the first time I'd used an IDE, the first time I'd built a cross platform app, first time I'd used Kotlin, and the first time I'd tried AI coding.
The journey started with choosing KMP as the stack, then I figured "here's the company that released KMP, they have an IDE, they have AI, I'll use that".
It was really useful, and convinced me that AI coding was the future. I didn't know Kotlin (I still don't) and I don't look at any of the code. I do look at diffs sometimes (less and less). My main "review" is "reviewing test failures", which is a workflow I developed over the past year.
It was about 4 months into using it that I figured out that the IDE was really doing nothing.
I rewrote their worktree functionality as a couple of bash scripts. The build and test functionality was all gradle on the command line anyway. I was just using it as a chat interface and a markdown reader.
So I set up tmux and used Junie CLI (I liked Junie as an agent), Kimi Code and Pi Coding agent simultaneously on different projects. Junie CLI was pretty good, but it had too many instructions and when I started getting particular about my workflows, compliance was too difficult.
Kimi Code and Pi kept winning, eventually I stopped using Junie altogether. The name of the game was doing things in parallel and in the background. Editing the code had nothing to do with it.
The thing I missed was how JetBrains AI credits worked. I loved switching between models, and didn't want to tell everyone on the team to have their own accounts. I looked around and saw some LLM gateways and stuff like OpenRouter, but then they are all still charging extra, so I just wrote my own LLM gateway and connected it to Pi.
But then I was like "what is Pi really doing here?". I wanted a thing I could use from my phone, and using tmux over Termius is pretty weak, so I was like "Oh maybe I can have a mobile app that uses Pi as an API or something" but then I kept hearing the creator of Pi talk about how simple the coding loop was so I just wrote the coding loop into my LLM gateway and then created clients for it for iOS, android, macOS, windows and web, all using Kotlin Multiplatform.
Now I've got my dream coding agent: I create work trees at the touch of a button from my phone, I discuss with the agent using the "reply mode" interleaved reply feature, I have a flexible bash script based workflow engine, a centralised script/skill distribution framework, centralised billing/model gateway, all built into a single dev box that runs everything and can be deployed using one of those fancy curl -> bash pipeline things. I can deploy to dev, staging and production at the touch of a button from my phone. Dev and staging are IP gated behind CloudFlare tunnels, the production deployment goes straight to GCP, using a standardised framework.
My colleagues and I use it to ship real internal and external products and they're not even developers.
I haven't read any code or reviewed any "PRs". I don't even use GitHub or linear!! But man when I go for a walk and sit down on park benches and dictate to my coding agent in my phone, set the workflow running and then keep walking it feels like a super power!
And this was more or less 1 year from starting my first project using IntelliJ IDEA + Junie + OpenAI GPT 5 and winding up using a mix of models on my own platform that I share with my colleagues.
I don't understand how an IDE development company or, really, any "coding agent development" company can maintain a competitive edge in the face of that kind of pressure.
EDIT: I did find their Air product very intriguing but they didn't get it released quickly enough and it didn't solve the problem of having things running in the background easily enough. Also their worktree setup and teardown functionality was a bit of a drag. I built my own platform and started using it to build itself quicker than they got Air to the stage where I would want to use it. They STILL haven't released their mobile client.
They need to put a whole lot of love in Junie, but even at that Warp is already miles ahead... so playing catch up is going to be a tough one.
loss size must be correlated with the memory usage of webstorm on my work machine...
Android Studio always was Google acquisition bait, but now they are going to need to be more serious about it.
I hate the JetBrains IDE, which is written in Java. Why can't they re-write it in C++ using Qt or wxWidgets?
Seems as if their expenditures increased a little bit. I don't think this is huge, since they did not perform that well in 2022 either.
No disrespect meant, but I don't see how companies like JetBrains can survive (and I've read their financial statements, their revenue growth is still decent). All their revenue comes from products and services that are effectively a long-form agentic session, proven by how many OSS replicas of their stack is out there. Their Junie agent (itself a replica of all other agents on the market) can ITSELF be replicated in a few dozen prompts, as evidenced by the 1000+ GitHub agent repos out there, most of whom are operated by a single college student. What's worse is that JetBrains' primary customer base is supposed to be composed of technical users and developers, the exact cohort that should be skilled enough to use LLMs to replicate their services for effectively zero cost. I guess the only thing that's saving them is inertia and goodwill.
All the air is getting sucked out of software companies due to AI, I'm seeing it happen in a number of places. Though in this case it may be due to their own AI investment on internal projects.
they've made a series of customer-hostile decisions in the past few years, so this investment is likely this freight train gathering pace
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why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
IDEs are on a steep decline, so not so surprising. I've disabled most code extensions from vscode and find myself using multiple terminals and the built in git diff UI. I barely see the code _as a whole_, only care about the _code_ changes.
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects
Yep, I don't remember the last time I opened up an IDE anymore. I mainly built my own open source AI coding orchestrator lol: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
This along with stack overflow seems to be the end of an era. Stack overflow had my back and JetBrains was like a super magical tool that I could tackle code bases with.