Jetbrains AI Assistant Review

I’ve always been a fan of JetBrains products. When I first switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ years ago, I was blown away by how smooth and powerful it was. A true IDE experience offers significantly more power than lightweight editors like VS Code—and this comes from someone who used VS Code daily for almost six years before returning to WebStorm.

Naturally, I wanted to explore what JetBrains had to offer in AI-assisted programming, especially compared to more popular options like Cursor and Windsurf.

The Experience

Having used Cursor previously, I was eager to see how a JetBrains-native AI solution would stack up.

Spoiler alert: There’s a lot of catching up to do. JetBrains AI Assistant feels about a year behind Cursor in terms of capabilities. To be fair, this may explain why it’s the least expensive of the three options.

The workflow is straightforward—you provide a prompt, and it suggests changes. However, I frequently had to nudge it to account for the right files, particularly my Prisma Schema or dependencies in package.json. Cursor, in comparison, handled these tasks much more efficiently, requiring fewer manual corrections.

Future Developments

JetBrains is developing an agentic AI plugin called Junie, which could significantly improve their AI offerings. However, it’s still in early access and won’t be available for WebStorm initially, making it a non-factor for now.

Unexpected Consequences

One of the biggest reasons I’m dropping the AI Assistant (for now) isn’t just its lackluster performance—it’s how it degrades WebStorm’s core functionality.

I’ve had the TypeScript service silently fail multiple times, with no resolution from restarting it. This forced me to rely on CLI/build commands to catch errors or switch back to Cursor/VS Code just to see basic file errors.

The AI Assistant also introduced noticeable slowdowns. On several occasions, the editor became sluggish, leaving a full restart as the only fix. Disabling the AI Assistant improved performance slightly, but not enough to justify keeping it enabled.

Conclusion

I still love WebStorm and would prefer to use it as my daily driver. However, paying for both the IDE license and AI Assistant only makes sense if the AI features enhance, not degrade the core experience.