JetBrains Drops Code With Me, Introduces AI‑Powered Central Platform – Impact on Developers
JetBrains announced the preview of its AI‑driven Central platform, featuring Air IDE and JetBrains Console for token management, while discontinuing the Code With Me collaborative coding tool, signaling a strategic shift toward AI agent orchestration and raising questions about pricing and developer workflow impacts.
JetBrains Central preview
JetBrains released a preview of Central, an AI‑driven software‑development platform that provides governance, cloud infrastructure for running AI agents, and a shared context that spans multiple repositories and projects.
Key technical components
Central currently includes two preview components:
Air IDE – an integrated development environment enhanced with AI assistance for code generation, navigation, and refactoring.
JetBrains Console – a management console that offers token provisioning, usage analytics, and policy enforcement for teams that consume AI models.
Early‑access rollout and pricing
The preview will be available to selected users in the second quarter of 2024. JetBrains indicated that enterprise‑focused pricing plans will be announced shortly, suggesting that the service may be priced at a premium for organizational use.
Operational considerations
According to Oleg Koverznev, head of the AI Agent Platform, the cost of generating code with large language models has fallen dramatically, removing it as a bottleneck. The remaining challenge is to manage the growing operational and economic complexity introduced by agent‑driven workflows, including token budgeting, scaling cloud agents, and enforcing governance policies.
Developer adoption survey
A JetBrains survey of 11 000 developers reported that:
90 % already use AI in some capacity.
22 % employ AI coding agents.
66 % plan to adopt AI agents within the next twelve months.
Deprecation of Code With Me
JetBrains announced that the collaborative coding feature “Code With Me” will be removed from the IDE bundle after version 2026.1. Starting with the next release, the functionality will be offered only as a standalone plugin, and the public relay infrastructure that powers the feature will be shut down in the first quarter of 2027. The decision reflects a decline in demand since the pandemic peak, but it may impact small teams that rely heavily on pair‑programming.
21CTO
21CTO (21CTO.com) offers developers community, training, and services, making it your go‑to learning and service platform.
How this landed with the community
Was this worth your time?
0 Comments
Thoughtful readers leave field notes, pushback, and hard-won operational detail here.