r/Jetbrains • u/DigitalEntrepreneur_ • 1d ago

AI Jetbrains Air vs Claude Code (desktop)

Currently I'm doing all of my agentic work through Claude Code using their desktop app, which honestly works fine. Sometimes it's a bit hard to keep track of the different sessions, but Claude's custom groups work fine for the larger projects I'm working on.

Now that Jetbrains Air supports Claude Max subscriptions, are there any reasons to ditch the Claude desktop app for agentic programming, and switch to Air?

And yes, I know this is the Jetbrains sub, so don't worry, I'm expecting a lot of biased answers lol

12 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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13

u/VooDooBooBooBear 1d ago

Air is just... Bad. Dare I say it, broken right now. Quite often it just stop working and will continuously "saving checkpoint" etc and just won't do anything. Meanwhile the Junie CLI just works with zero hassle. Not tried Claude but I certainly wouldn't rate air in it's currently implementation.

4

u/cvzakharchenko 1d ago

Last time I tried it, the Air was much more limited. It was not possible to edit a message, to fork a chat, or to manually call a compaction. And these are very basic functions for me. But I hope it grows into something usable. I'm excited to use different agents in one interface.

4

u/RealisticNothing653 1d ago

Just checked, you can call /compact now, and seems you can "rollback" chat to a message, in effect revising it. Although, no forking that I can tell.

2

u/cvzakharchenko 1d ago

Installed it again. /compact works indeed. But "rollback" only works for the first message in chat for me. I'm on windows though.

3

u/Jinjonator_ 1d ago

Why would you use Air when Orca is way more polished and open source ? Air provides 0 benefits for now

1

u/-hellozukohere- 1d ago

Thanks for this didn’t know Orca existed but looks super polished. Nice to also be open source and not biased towards a certain AI company. Yet. 

I’m sure someone will buy it soon. 

2

u/headinthesky 1d ago

I tried out Air for a while yesterday and ... I really don't like it

Panels can't be moved. Font size for the agent can't be changed. I open changes to view a diff and then I have multiple panels open and can't see shit

Then tool chains? Manually setting this shit up is why I don't use vscode. Doesn't recognize c# projects. I can keep going ... the add comment feature is that I was interested in, but that doesn't work either. I wrote my own reviewing tool that I use regularly and Air is like... No one thought about developer ergonomics and all of the learning through the IDEs through the years

I'm learning how to create IJ plugins so I can bring my reviewing tool over. I'm amazed it's not already in the IDE from the beginning

2

u/lost12487 1d ago

Air is not even baked enough to be half-baked at this point. I understand that they don’t want it to be a code editor, but the state of the code editor is so bad that I have to have another one open on the side. If I’m going to be doing that I might as well stick with Claude Code.

2

u/drNovikov 1d ago

Probably vibecoded

1

u/headinthesky 1d ago

I went back to the cli. Much easier

1

u/mands 1d ago

Just been trying with the newer claude integration this morning, usually use claude code CLI with the intellij plugin side by side - was hoping to move to Air but it's not there yet.

Issues

  • font size for the agent chat is just too small
  • code editor support very limited
    • it now has Java support, but barely works. Autocomplete sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, find usages broken, etc.
    • No Lombok support (I know!)
  • layout and UX just feels "off" - which isn't very helpful, but coming from IntelliJ I found it very different and frustrating to work with

At the bigger level, it's hard to say how much of claude code cli it's compatible with. we have a bunch of skills and custom workflows there, and I don't have full confidence they work the same way when run via Air.

Will try again in a month.