JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

Yes, it's a terrible excuse, and it's concerning that they think it's a good one. I highly doubt that they make a habit of fielding requests from plugin authors to nuke outdated reviews: you simply can't scale the verification that would require to do honestly. If they don't offer this as an option to others then this move is wrong both for the reasons you give and because they're claiming a privilege in their app store that they won't afford to their competition.

I wonder if they remove reviews that complain about bugs that were resolved (at least according to the plugin author) for all other plugins that aren’t theirs… Do they? … yeah I thought so.

I agree, it shouldn't be. Particularly as I can't imagine them removing reviews if it praised a feature that was subsequently removed or changed.

If they are both marketplace and seller, and if this is a policy they apply to all vendors, seems fine to me.

…why can’t I edit this 9-minute old comment for formatting? @dang

> They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI

Disagree, I keep trying Jetbrains once in a while and keep walking away disappointed (used to be a hardcore user). I use VS Code bc it is seamlessly polyglot. Jetbrains wants me to launch a whole separate IDE for different use cases, which is just horrible UX for me. Why would I pay hundreds for a worse UX?

They’re in a difficult position because half their users want more AI but the other half complain loudly when it’s forced on them. Cursor is beating them because they can deeply embed AI everywhere without worrying about this.

Yeah, I’ve spent some time building IntelliJ plugins, and honestly, the authoring experience has some real limitations. It’s not the easiest platform to work with, especially when it comes to writing automated tests. That might be part of the reason why their or any third-party AI plugins don’t feel as smooth as the ones on VS Code.

I actually have hopes that this will work out for them in the long run. Their bet seems to be at this point including the AI stuff in with the subscription: staving off the existential threat to their business without charging more, while still not having to spend insane amounts paying for someone else's model.

At least with code completion it's pretty obvious at this point that no one needs the overpowered top-line models, and the trajectory on local LLMs is such that I don't think it's unreasonable for them to hope to avoid the big players entirely.

They don't need to beat Claude for it to work, they just need to keep their customers satisfied.

They don't need to do it themselves; there lots of AI plugins for IntelliJ and I use one by Sourcegraph.

Didn’t you read the ridiculously long legal document and agreed to it when you got the license in the beginning as well?

Their main target market are enterprise Java developers, whose intersection with "people who like to program for the joy of it" is close to zero.

Lately they've also been coddling with the VSCode crowd by aggressively pushing the new UI over loud objections of old loyal users.

Either one seems like direct opposite of the hacker user you're mentioning.

After hearing so much about Cursor, and then reading your comment, I decided to give it a try. Here's my honest, first ever time trying to use it:

- I go to its website and neither on the homepage nor the features tab does it bother listing what languages the IDE is even for. Is it Python? C? HTML? It's an IDE .. for what? What languages? What project types? How can they not list this basic fact?

- Oh well, click the big Download link, and it downloads an app image file. No idea what to do with this, never seen one before, have to google it.

- Mark the file as executable and run it and get a cryptic error: "The setuid sandbox is not running as root" and it errors out.

- Back to google, google for that error message. Find various Cusor bug reports and people complaining about it but they haven't bothered fixing it.

- Find a workaround, to pass in a –no-sandbox arg when running Cursor, and now I get it to launch.

- It opens up but the text is incredibly small on my (4K) monitor and the text coloring is a dark grey that's almost indistinguishable from the background color, immediately go look for settings to fix it. There's ~50 settings results for "font" or "size", I change a few of them and it seems to make no impact to the UI font and I quickly give up and just want to try the editor.

- I read online that I need a "CMake Tools" extension to open a CMake project. In cursor I open the extensions marketplace and search for "CMake" and there's zero results. I try to open a CMakeLists file anyways and it opens it as a text file and then prompts me to install a "CMake Tools" extension. Ok? Why didn't it show up in the marketplace before?

- I click the popup about the CMake Tools extension it opens the marketplace page for it, showing me the details about it. Whilst I'm reading the details for example to see who the author of the extension is, whether it's even a legit extension or not, the reviews of it, it just automatically installs it by default without me clicking the Install button that was on the page.

- After installing the extension the CMake file I opened is just in a tab but hasn't imported the CMake project, so I close it and re-open it from the File->Open menu.

- It again just opens the file as a plain text file and doesn't actually try to import the CMake project in any way, I don't see any popup or button or call to action to actually import the CMake project in any way.

- I give up and just switch back to my normal IDE

Ditto, I love JetBrains, but cannot ignore Cursor. I use the IntelliJ shortcuts / Darcula extensions to help with familiarity.

Among the ones you mentioned, I also tried Gemini Code Assist JetBrains extension, but it doesn't integrate anywhere close to what Cursor does. (Direct code inserts, rollbacks, checkpoints, context integration) Zzzzz come on JetBrains

The subscription costs are worth it?

But that would be a lot of work and the damned user could reply or update their review that “it still doesn’t work and my review still stands”.

If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.

Yeah, I cancelled my subscription when it became clear they just did not care about my custom any more. The core products had pain points just sat with open issues forever, and they just started doing nothing but trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't care about or want.

I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's really sad seeing that devolve into the same mess of "you are the product" as virtually everything else, despite the fact they were still demanding my money.

I even tried, when my old work-paid CoPilot subscription expired, to use a paid membership for their AI tool. It was so-so, but I was happy to give them money. And then my modest use for my personal open source project hit their monthly limit.

So I just went back to CoPilot.

I know they don't have deep pockets, but, like you, I'd rather they just spend it on making a good tool.