“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 terminals, desktop applications and remote environments, leaving question marks hanging over the future of the integrated development environment (IDE).

That shift poses a particularly interesting question for JetBrains. The company has spent 26 years building some of the industry’s best-known IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and WebStorm, even as agentic development has begun pulling more software work outside the editor. JetBrains, for its part, has maintained that the IDE will remain a core part of professional development, particularly as developers are asked to manage the growing volumes of AI-generated code — humans need to review, debug, and verify, after all.

Now, the company’s making a much bigger bet on the broader development system that sits around the IDE.

JetBrains CEO Kirill Skrygan took to LinkedIn on Tuesday to formally unveil JetBrains Air as an “open system of products for agentic software development” for developers and companies, operating “inside and beyond JetBrains IDEs.” And Skrygan didn’t hold back on what he feels is a monumental moment for the company.

“JetBrains is taking one of the most significant steps in our 26-year history.”

“Today, JetBrains is taking one of the most significant steps in our 26-year history,” he writes.

Getting some Air

In truth, Air represents a repackaging of several strands of JetBrains’ recent AI work under a single banner, including an agentic experience inside its IDEs, tooling for coordinating developers and autonomous agents, and company-level controls for governing their use.

By way of a brief recap, JetBrains first launched Air in public preview back in March as a standalone “agentic development environment,” initially for macOS, where developers could run the likes of Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI and JetBrains’ own Junie side by side. At the same time, it pushed Junie itself outside the IDE with Junie CLI, giving developers access to the coding agent from terminals, CI/CD systems and other editors.

Creating a new Git worktree task in the Air desktop app

A couple of weeks later came JetBrains Central, a separate system aimed further up the organization, providing the controls and infrastructure for companies running multiple coding agents. Then in July, JetBrains launched AI for Teams and Organizations, effectively adding shared context, cloud agents, automations, and organization-wide governance and cost controls that could sit above whatever AI tools developers were already using.

Today’s announcement now gives these efforts a common home under the JetBrains Air umbrella. In a separate blog post published on Tuesday, Skrygan describes three main parts to the system: Air in JetBrains IDEs for directing agents and checking their work; Air Teams for coordinating work between developers and autonomous agents; and Air Governance, the new name for JetBrains Central, for managing policy, auditing, costs and AI use across a company.

The original Air desktop IDE hasn’t gone away either, it seems. It remains available as a standalone desktop application on macOS, Windows and Linux, alongside a browser-based version for organizations. That leaves “Air” doing double duty: it’s still the name of JetBrains’ dedicated agentic development environment, while now also serving as the banner for the wider collection of products around it.

What does JetBrains Air actually do?

JetBrains Air is available inside JetBrains IDEs, through the browser, and from the command line via Air Gateway, which brings terminal agents such as Claude Code and Codex into Air.

JetBrains Air in the CLI

For individual developers, Air can be used to supervise several pieces of agent work at once. They can keep multiple projects and agent sessions running, while tracking new activity, changed files and outgoing commits, then inspect the resulting changes using JetBrains’ IDE tooling.

Multiple agent sessions running inside a JetBrains IDE

Air Teams, which is still in early access, moves some of that activity into shared cloud environments, where developers can collaborate on projects and run agent tasks without tying the work to one person’s machine. Teams can also configure recurring automations and centrally manage the environments and external tools available to agents.

Air Teams showing shared projects and agent automations in the browser

Air Governance, meanwhile, provides the organization-level controls, including deciding which models and agents developers can access, setting permissions and spending limits, and tracking AI usage across teams.

Those governance capabilities are also only offered through JetBrains’ early access program for now.

Air Governance showing AI access, seats, credits and per-user limits

It’s worth noting that JetBrains also plans to extend Air to the mobile realm, where developers will be able to monitor and continue agent work away from their desktop.

JetBrains Air running on mobile

For JetBrains, the point is to connect those different layers while remaining open to outside agents and tools.

“JetBrains Air cannot be just another agent or development environment.”

“JetBrains Air cannot be just another agent or development environment,” Skrygan writes. “It must connect products for individual work, team coordination, organizational control, context, and process automation — and remain open to the tools and agents developers choose, including those JetBrains does not build.”

Air in the IDE

While the core raison d’être of JetBrains Air is to provide somewhere for developers and companies to work with software agents — be it Claude, Codex, Junie or something else entirely — JetBrains is clearly emphasizing that its IDE roots remain part of that future.

Skrygan says the company has historically “focused primarily on the individual developer workbench,” but Air broadens its remit to encompass the wider environment in which agentic work is started, carried out, coordinated, reviewed and governed.

“Our IDEs will continue to be where professional developers work with agents, understand and verify code, and make the decisions that shape what ships.”

“Our IDEs will continue to be where professional developers work with agents, understand and verify code, and make the decisions that shape what ships,” Skrygan writes. “JetBrains Air extends that control across the broader system developing around them.”

And that fresh IDE piece has already been in the public domain for more than a month. JetBrains has been testing the Air Alpha plugin since at least early August, giving developers a way to run and supervise multiple coding agents directly inside IntelliJ-based IDEs, and review the changes they produce using native IDE tooling.

An updated release earlier this month added more controls for monitoring and steering agent sessions.

Air Alpha lets developers review agent-generated code changes as native IDE diffs.

JetBrains concedes that Air “Alpha” is very much that — an early iteration it’s building while it rolls out JetBrains Air itself. And so users should expect “rough edges, changes to the UI and behavior, and updates roughly every week.”

What Tuesday’s announcement does, though, is give that work a formal place within the wider Air system. And while Skrygan acknowledges that agentic development means that work must now span multiple surfaces, the technology that has sat at the heart of its business for the past 26 years won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

“The IDE remains important to JetBrains’ future,” Skrygan writes.

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.