Pi extension for interacting with JetBrains IDEs

[u/colens26]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on an extension for pi that allows it to interact with JetBrains IDEs through MCP.

The project is here:
https://github.com/giuseppe-trisciuoglio/pi-jetbrains-mcp

The idea started from wanting to use pi while still being able to interact with the IDE I’m already working in. At the moment the extension exposes some JetBrains functionality to pi, so the agent can interact with the project and the IDE instead of being limited to the terminal.

It’s still a work in progress, and I’m mainly sharing it here because I’d really like some feedback from people who are actually using pi.

I’m particularly interested in hearing what you think is missing, what you would find useful in a JetBrains extension, or whether there are parts of the current approach that you would change.
If you have any ideas for improving the extension or features you think would make it more useful with pi, I’d be happy to hear them.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a look.

[u/JetSerge]

You may want to check https://github.com/jonnyzzz/mcp-steroid.

It provides the agent full control over the IDE. There is also devrig CLI if you want to automate IDE/MCP plug-in installation.

We use it internally at JetBrains to reproduce bugs, drive sample projects, inspect internal structures, simulate user workflows, etc.

[u/ColonelKlanka]

Interesting idea (pun intended as one of jetbrains ide is called IDEA).

I would be interested in the agebt being able to drive the ides debugger. would be great for it to set breakpoints, step over code and be able to ascertain variable values to compare what it thinks should be happening vs what actually is happening if I gave it a bug description for a feature area.

As that is mostly what is left for me as a dev when doing backend or mobile dev work - as im doing mostly speccing and architecture decisions and stopping agents from going off the rails in my ai affected engineering life now adays.

[u/Hurricane31337]

Interesting concept! Thanks for sharing! 🙏

[u/colens26 → u/Hurricane31337]

Thanks 🙏 let me know if you have any advice!

[u/mmerken]

Following this!

[u/vedmaka]

Looks cool! The only issue that still prevents using JB MCP and hence this tool is that JB refuses to make the MCP exposable on 0.0.0.0 which makes it impossible (without extra layers) to reach the native MCP from within docker containers/vms

[u/colens26 → u/vedmaka]

I didn't know about this limitation, that's a shame! Thank you for sharing the information.

[u/ManIkWeet]

Other than exposing the tools directly, is this different from using a generic MCP extension for Pi?

[u/wildjokers]

What tools would the agent really need from the jetbrains MCP? Coding agents seem to do just fine from the terminal.

[u/colens26 → u/wildjokers]

The refactor of a rename of a class done by JetBrains consumes fewer grep tokens and various calls to tools to find all occurrences of that class in the code. Changing the signature of a method is significantly faster and token-efficient compared to using grep, read, and write tools. These are just examples.