JetBrains cancels Fleet

Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year.

Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.

Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.

Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.

I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!

In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.

I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again

Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining two overlapping product lines.

For Jetbrains: if LLM's are such a terrific productivity booster, why don't you put it to work to speed through all your open tickets and get the product in top shape? In the time you saved you can build agentic whatevers.

Or LLM's aren't really that great after all? Then focus on your damn IDE. Leave refactoring by hallucination to the electron kids and just provide stable and performant editors and analyses around Abstract Syntax Trees.

It's probably a wise move and not so different to what many other companies have experienced in the past.

Netscape tried to remake Navigator whilst halting development on the old codebase, and it killed them.

Microsoft tried to remake Word, the rewrite failed. Luckily they had continued to develop the old codebase in parallel.

Google tried to remake Gmail multiple times. Every attempt failed.

Apple tried for years to remake MacOS Classic and failed every time. Eventually they had to buy and reskin NeXTStep.

Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up.

I kinda expected Fleet to die from the day it was first announced. IntelliJ is an extremely mature product that's hard to compete with. They've continually managed big changes to it to keep up with changing fashions and trends in the IDE space, most recently with their new Islands theme that launched yesterday, with integrated coding agents and so on. It's outlasted continuous competition from free IDEs that are always abandoned after enough years pass and whichever executive was championing subsidies moves on or retires (see: NetBeans, Eclipse, VS Express, MonoDevelop...). VS Code isn't so different. Fleet was clearly a reaction to that but the concept was not innovative and focused on reinventing wheels that users wouldn't be able to tell the difference for and which would consume most of their budget, like writing a new UI toolkit, or using a split frontend/backend architecture. Same mistake Mozilla made. Meanwhile IntelliJ was continuously refactored and improved, so Fleet chased a moving target even when they reused a lot of code.

Although people will hate to hear it, the history of the IDE market suggests that eventually MS will get tired of funding VS Code without a big revenue stream to justify its existence. Executives like making new projects and being able to present growth because it represents glittering future potential, but they hate being landed with the maintenance of loss making legacy projects when the originators move on. There's no glory there. For all their problems, JetBrains aren't going to lose interest in their core products due to random executive churn, and that has given their core IDEs a remarkable staying power.

Alls they need to do is make extensions much much easier to build, especially extensions that render HTML.

That's vscode's moat.

Anytime the same extension exist in both vscode and jetbrains, the jetbrains version is clunky, crash, and unstable.

I keep Jetbrains open while using vscode, for its local history/git/etc features, but how long will that be enough to keep my subscription

Good, I tried Fleet but it was like VSCode without the extensions (as in a community, they had support for plugins or whatever but the support wasn't there) and I don't like VSCode even with extensions. It was the worst of all worlds.

Let the people that want to build an IDE from the ground up have their fun over in VSCode land, please just focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.

PS: Agentic development is fine to pursue but so far things like Claude Code run laps around everything JetBrains has tried. Add "mount points" for agentic flows but please just focus on making a powerful IDE. Agentic development was unable to lure me away from JetBrains, double down on that, not trying to be Cursor.

> User feedback was consistent: If you already work with IntelliJ IDEA, Rider, WebStorm, PyCharm, or any other JetBrains IDE, switching to Fleet required a strong reason – and Fleet did not offer enough value to justify the transition from IDEs you already know and love.

My problem was that Fleet just wasn't very good when compared with VSC.

For my more serious development I use JetBrains IDEs (one of the few pieces of software that I actually pay for, alongside MobaXTerm and some others) but Fleet didn't neither use that much less resources, nor was that much more responsive, nor was a step above VSC in any way. To be clear, I didn't hate it, it wasn't horrible and with a bit more work could have been quite good... just not convincingly so up until now.

If they wanted to throw some more years of engineering at it, maybe, I mean look at what Zed is doing and it seems to be okay, but I don't think it makes that much business sense for them - they already have Junie available in their editors for AI stuff and that other subscription (though I just use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and sometimes VSC with KiloCode/RooCode/Cline and either those models through the API or Cerebras Code since it works pretty well in there).

I just find that most AI solutions out there are also a little bit half-baked, like Gemini CLI fails when I paste multiple lines into it, whereas KiloCode/RooCode/Cline are unable to give a model enough helpful instructions for it to not start looping when it fails applying a complex diff sometimes, and pretty much nothing outside of the regular GitHub Copilot plugins does autocomplete decently (especially if you want a local model with Ollama or something, no good options, Continue.dev is trash).

With how prevalent AI is and how useful various linters and build output is, sometimes I wonder whether I need to pay hundreds of euros for the Ultimate package of tools when I don't write/refactor as much code manually and doing what I need inside of VSC also feels more and more sufficient. Maybe a bit except Java codebases, Spring Boot sometimes does weird shit and you're better served by an IDE that's aware of all of the templating, annotations and other stuff.

Oh well, despite being RAM hogs, I still enjoy the experience of using JetBrains IDEs and if nothing else will keep them around for that reason for a while. A bit like how I also enjoy a GUI of some sort for Git, like previously I paid for GitKraken but reevaluating my usage found that SourceTree is also decent enough for the price (free vs GitKraken paid version), I can just drop down to the CLI for niche use cases.

I have been paying for JetBrains for years, but, as many have pointed out in this thread, between the performance issues and agentic IDEs like Cursor, it's getting harder and harder to justify.

JetBrains, just focus on improving the existing IDEs and naturally embedding access to third party LLM agents in them and you're good to go.

Interesting how much churn did they have because of Cursor?

Personally I thought I would never switch from Pycharm/Webstorm after 12 years of using. 1 day and no way to go back. Insane.

I saw they implemented custom AI model and it was useless compared to frontier models. The moment is lost. I hope they will catch up and show who is the king.

I really feel like JetBrains has no idea what their value proposition is anymore.

It used to be that no matter what language you were working with, JetBrains was the answer for the serious poweruser.

Now JetBrains is little more than VSCode with a subscription. They've absolutely ruined the UI, performance keeps getting worse, they're trying really hard to shove their useless AI at you, and when you complain about it, you either get dismissed, deleted, or gaslighted.

JetBrains is actively pushing out their base power users and betting the entire farm on taking a small percentage of VSCode users.

All the old hats like me are canceling subscriptions while new users are piling onto the free versions and are unlikely to convert to paid.

Because again, JetBrains has stripped their programs of any utility or identity and just made a cheap VSCode clone that costs a ridiculous amount of money for no apparent benefit.

I'm really mad about this. JetBrains made IDEs that sparked joy. It was a real tool for real professionals that need to get shit done and not play 40 goddamn questions to find the unlabeled button I'm looking for. They used to get out of your way and stay there. Now I have disembodied text floating in an undifferentiated sea of whitespace and hieroglyphs.

And through all of this, JetBrains insists that I'm wrong for wanting labeled buttons or for not wanting a new UI. A JetBrains employee told me to my face that the new UI had to happen because they must innovate. They did not offer a response when asked about what they've innovated instead of copying from VSCode.

JetBrains put essentially all core development on halt for years and spent millions of dollars on the UI redesign. They brag about how many thousands of bugs they fixed in the new UI, and seem to be unaware that they're bragging that they created several thousand new bugs instead of fixing old ones.

JetBrains has totally lost the plot and are on the fast track to irrelevance.

A few days ago I found out that the jetbrains toolbox doesn't actually log you out when you're logging out - they just seemingly stop renewing your token

I found out about it because switching accounts isn't possible, you get logged into your old account unless some time has elapses.

Not a big security issue though, I mean after a day or so it it's actually logged out, just not within the same hour (no idea how long it actually takes - just know it's not within an hour)