“One of the most significant steps in our 26-year history”: JetBrains goes big on agentic development — and bets the IDE still matters
There’s little question that AI coding agents have changed where software development work happens. Developers can increasingly delegate work from The post “One of the most significant steps in our 26-year history”: JetBrains goes big on agentic development — and bets the IDE still matters appeared first on The New Stack .
JetBrains has made a significant move in its 26-year history by unveiling JetBrains Air, an open system of products for agentic software development. This announcement marks a pivotal moment for the company as it seeks to adapt to the growing prevalence of AI coding agents in software development.
JetBrains CEO Kirill Skrygan highlighted the importance of the IDE in professional development, emphasizing that humans still need to review, debug, and verify AI-generated code. However, with the increasing volumes of AI-generated code, the company recognizes the need for a broader development system that goes beyond the IDE.
JetBrains Air serves as a unifying platform for several recent AI initiatives within the company. It includes an agentic experience within JetBrains IDEs, tooling for coordinating developers and autonomous agents, and company-level controls for managing AI usage. Air was initially launched in March as a standalone agentic development environment for macOS, followed by the introduction of Junie CLI, which allowed developers to access the coding agent from terminals, CI/CD systems, and other editors.
In July, JetBrains introduced AI for Teams and Organizations, which added shared context, cloud agents, automations, and organization-wide governance to existing AI tools. These efforts have now been consolidated under the JetBrains Air umbrella, with Air available inside JetBrains IDEs, through a browser, and from the command line via Air Gateway.
For individual developers, Air enables the supervision of multiple agent work sessions within the IDE, tracking new activity, changed files, and outgoing commits. It also allows developers to inspect changes using JetBrains' IDE tooling. Air Teams, still in early access, facilitates shared cloud environments for collaboration on projects and runs agent tasks without tying the work to a single machine. Developers can configure recurring automations and centrally manage external tools available to agents within Air Teams.
Air Governance, formerly known as JetBrains Central, provides organization-level controls. It enables companies to decide which models and agents developers can access, set permissions, spending limits, and track AI usage across teams. Currently, these governance capabilities are only available through JetBrains' early access program.
Looking ahead, JetBrains plans to extend Air to mobile devices, allowing developers to monitor and continue agent work away from their desktops. The company emphasizes that Air should not be seen as just another agent or development environment, but rather a comprehensive system that connects different layers while remaining open to outside agents and tools.
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