alt Hacker News> and investing in... something.
Reads like aimlessly burning whatever they felt they were able to burn without existential risk on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
In other words: nothing to see here, same as everybody else.
Replies
I think they're in the perfect position to take a stab at actually monetizing a "just-works-and-good-enough" local code-assistant that works well enough to save people on burning tokens with the big providers and/or keeping their data offline for regulatory reasons (ie also selling to customers that CANNOT use Claude or OpenAI).
1: Local models are catching up quickly
2: Visual Studio Intellicode (not to be confused with Intellisense) was/is surprisingly good at suggestions (when it first appeared before people went over to CLI's I felt that it was almost magically good for it's time, turned off co-pilot and whatever backend for a reason of compliance for a local workspace and the suggestions are quite good still even if not on the same level as the frontier suggestions).
If it pans out, with their brand people many would probably be happy to fork over for a Jetbrains licence.
JetBrains Air
The future is in AI. An IDE without AI integration is no longer a marketable product.
People are not going to stop using AI no matter what your concerns or feelings are.
> without existential risk
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
I still have this naive notion that we don't need LLMs for code generation and editing. Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens and a highly intelligent editor/IDE comes around that charges $1000/yr and gets more output at a fixed cost, its a no-brainer of a decision.