From Fleet to Air JetBrains Bets Big on an AI Powered Future
In a decisive move that has sent ripples through the software development community, JetBrains announced the discontinuation of Fleet, its modern Integrated Development Environment once positioned as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. This is not merely the sunsetting of a product in preview; it represents a fundamental strategic pivot away from the traditional IDE model and a full-throated commitment to an AI-centric future. The company is trading its familiar toolkit for a new paradigm: an agentic development environment named Air. This article explores the intricate reasons behind Fleet’s demise, the ambitious vision for its AI-powered successor, and what this seismic shift signals for the very nature of coding.
The Rise and Fall of a VS Code Competitor
To understand the significance of this transition, one must look back at Fleet’s origins. Launched in 2021, Fleet was a bold statement from JetBrains. Built from scratch with a new, lightweight architecture, it was designed to be a modern, collaborative, and polyglot IDE—a stark departure from the company’s powerful but monolithic JVM-based IntelliJ platform. This move was widely interpreted as a necessary response to the meteoric rise of VS Code, which had captured a massive developer audience with its speed and extensibility. Fleet represented a multi-year investment and a strategic hedge against a changing market. Its failure to launch beyond a public preview provides the crucial context for why JetBrains is now making such an aggressive and potentially risky leap into agentic AI.
The Anatomy of a Strategic Pivot
The Cannibalization Problem Why Fleet Couldnt Outshine IntelliJ
Internally, JetBrains faced a classic innovator’s dilemma. In an official statement, executives admitted that maintaining two distinct IDE families created brand confusion and diluted the company’s focus. Fleet was caught in an impossible position: it failed to offer a compelling enough reason for developers to abandon the rich, mature ecosystem of IntelliJ IDEA, yet it also couldn’t carve out a distinct niche for itself. The very success of JetBrains’ flagship products, with their extensive plug-in libraries and deep-seated developer loyalty, became Fleet’s biggest obstacle. While the company frames the project as a “valuable experiment” whose components have been integrated elsewhere, the core lesson was clear: competing with yourself is a losing game.
Battling Inertia The Uphill Climb Against Established Ecosystems
Beyond internal competition, Fleet struggled against powerful external forces. The software development landscape is notoriously sticky; developers invest years mastering their tools and workflows. For Fleet to succeed, it needed to be exponentially better than not only VS Code but also JetBrains’ own established products. Its perpetual “public preview” status never inspired the confidence needed for developers or organizations to commit fully. This protracted development cycle meant it couldn’t build the critical mass of users and third-party extensions necessary to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. Ultimately, the combination of developer inertia and the powerful network effects of IntelliJ and VS Code proved to be an insurmountable barrier.
Repurposing the Platform The Strategic Pivot to Agentic AI
The Fleet platform is not being discarded but reborn. Its modern architecture serves as the foundation for Air, a new tool designed for an entirely different workflow. Instead of writing code, the developer’s primary role in Air is to guide, prompt, and review the output of an AI agent. Currently in a limited preview for macOS with an Anthropic subscription, JetBrains’ roadmap for Air is ambitious. It includes planned support for Windows and Linux, a browser-based version, integration with other AI models like Codex and Gemini, and a cloud execution mode where the agent can work autonomously. This isn’t just an IDE with better autocompletion; it’s a radical reimagining of the developer’s relationship with the machine.
The New Arms Race Navigating the AI Driven Development Landscape
JetBrains’ pivot is not happening in a vacuum. It is a calculated move in a burgeoning industry-wide arms race to define the future of software creation. With Air, JetBrains is positioning itself to compete directly against similar agentic offerings from tech giants, such as AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity, and Microsoft’s increasingly AI-infused VS Code. This industry-wide shift suggests a future where the core competency of a developer may evolve from meticulous code implementation to high-level architectural guidance and AI supervision. The central question is no longer “Which IDE is best?” but “Which AI partner is most effective?”
Lessons from a Discontinued IDE What This Means for Developers
The key takeaway from this strategic shift is twofold. First, the discontinuation of a promising product like Fleet underscores the immense power of established ecosystems and the high bar for displacing incumbent tools. Second, JetBrains’ all-in bet on Air is a clear signal that the industry is moving beyond AI as a simple assistant and toward AI as an active agent. For developers, the implications are profound. The mixed community reaction—disappointment from Fleet enthusiasts and skepticism from those who wanted AI integrated into IntelliJ—highlights a core tension. While some mourn the loss of a modern IDE, others must now grapple with the learning curve of a completely new, AI-first workflow. The immediate call to action is to begin experimenting with these emerging agentic tools to understand how they will reshape roles and responsibilities.
A Bold Gambit Will JetBrains AI Agent Redefine Coding
In closing, the story of Fleet and Air is more than a tale of one product’s end and another’s beginning. It is a microcosm of the disruption sweeping through the tech industry. JetBrains, a company that built its empire on perfecting the developer’s craft through intelligent IDEs, is now betting its future on a model that fundamentally alters that craft. The company faced an insurmountable challenge in convincing developers to adopt a new IDE. The question that will define its next chapter is whether it can succeed where Fleet failed and persuade them to adopt an entirely new way of working.
