Last Wednesday, JetBrains – creator of some of the most popular IDEs – launched their groundbreaking new AI Assistant feature to augment developer workflows. This novel coding assistant intelligently taps into rich context from the IDE environment to enable powerful next-generation support right within the existing tools developers know and adore.
Rather than taking a narrow vendor-specific AI approach, JetBrains smartly leverages a diverse ensemble of large language models (LLMs). This allows its assistant to take advantage of the unique strengths of multiple models under the hood while delivering a unified user experience. Consequently, the output is stronger AI-powered functionality, including contextual code suggestions, automated refactoring, and next-level documentation aids.
A key point to mention here is that although the personal information from the IDEs is accessed to generate prompts by third-party LLM-related companies, they don’t store this information.
All in all, JetBrains’ newly unveiled AI Assistant truly represents the next paradigm of coding tools. It goes leaps beyond today’s code completion to act as a superlative copilot – one that develops deep understanding across projects to drive automated documentation, explain cryptic legacy code, suggest coherent changes, and more.
Rather than cobbling together disjointed AI piece parts, JetBrains merges advanced generative linguistics models like OpenAI with its own proprietary models trained on development artifacts. This, in turn, powers the Assistant’s remarkable ability not just to write code but also to comprehend code and explain its own recommendations. Integrating with the IDE further enhances context to link commits to the reasoning behind them, enhancing its usability.
Currently, owing to the cost of utilizing large language models, only paying customers can access this feature. While the plan is to facilitate all developers, at the moment, only paying users can leverage the power of this AI assistant, which is available as an add-on to the majority of JetBrains IDEs including IDEA, PyCharm, and ReSharper. Users who have educational or open-source licenses for these tools will still have to wait.
References:
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3711543/jetbrains-ships-ai-assistant-for-jetbrains-ides.html
