JetBrains Thinkrail

(github.com)

95 points | by hmokiguess 4 hours ago

16 comments

  • exizt88 39 minutes ago
    I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously. If you haven't bothered to write a readme, what else have you not bothered to do?

    (100% AI according to Pangram btw)

    • vehemenz 18 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • asteroidburger 23 minutes ago
      Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you? If I take all of my design docs/specs, all of the existing repo, and I tell an agent that I'd like to make a readme that contains things X, Y, and Z, what's the problem?

      Rejecting slop doesn't imply rejecting all AI-generated text wholesale.

      • sigotirandolas 2 minutes ago
        > Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you?

        1. AI generated text is just hard to read and verbose, if you worked so hard on your docs/specs, why would you want your README to be unreadable?

        2. There's so much garbage written with AI that I'm just going to assume yours also is. Would you sign up to a gym with broken windows? It could be the best gym ever, but I wouldn't count on it.

      • JumpCrisscross 4 minutes ago
        > what's the problem?

        I can do that. Probably better for my needs than someone else’s agent can. The README is meant to communicate substance and intent. Without the latter it’s just a landing page.

      • FridgeSeal 17 minutes ago
        The problem is that it’s market or care and respect. If you can’t even be bothered to while a simple readme communication your intentions, what else can’t you be bothered doing properly?

        It’s a marker that the project is likely to be low-effort slop, which may or may not just be abandoned at the deep of a hat.

      • troupo 17 minutes ago
        Because AI-generated README means that the person doesn't care about the audience. It means that the author never read the README themselves to see that the "load-bearing ground truths" actually reflect what the project is about, and not some hallucinated bullshit.

        There's a famous Jobs story in which he insisted that even the insides of the computers be made beautiful. Because that shows care. Now people are arguing that even the outsides can be as ugly as they want, who cares.

        • ChrisClark 11 minutes ago
          What if they read it and concluded it was correct?
          • JumpCrisscross 2 minutes ago
            > What if they read it and concluded it was correct?

            Then I’ll probably hear about it again from someone I trust. I don’t need to be the first in my circle to test if this one is different.

  • Deukhoofd 9 minutes ago
    Didn't JetBrains release JetBrains Air recently? This looks like it's basically the same basic premise, except implemented differently. What's their strategy here, are they just launching competing products?

    https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

    • crummy 1 minute ago
      At a guess, they are uncertain about the long term financial viability of selling their full IDEs, and development is cheap, so they are throwing up what they can to see what sticks, and will kill what doesn’t.
    • JumpCrisscross 5 minutes ago
      Who is naming this stuff…
  • dr_faustus 31 minutes ago
    I’ve been using JetBrains IDEs for over a decade but rarely open them anymore because working on several worktrees concurrently is extremely frustrating and wasteful. Their AI strategy is all over the place and they always wanted to sell their opaque and overpriced tokens, which made no sense. I hope they get their act together.
    • Deukhoofd 15 minutes ago
      Yeah, their worktree implementation was very recently hacked in, and it really doesn't work well. The IDE project list duplicate entries for every worktree, IDE project settings don't transfer across worktrees, and every time I switch to another worktree it asks me again what project I want to open, instead of just opening the same solution I have opened.

      It's wild that a set of IDEs that are generally fairly good just completely fail in this basic workflow. I really wonder what went through the minds of the product owners and developers that implemented this.

    • cdmckay 9 minutes ago
      I canceled my subscription after like 12 years because I realized all the things that made it great aren’t really needed anymore. The “it just works” tooling, refactoring, jumping around code, etc.

      Now my agents mainly write code under my direction and I review it either in the harness or on GitHub.

      I hadn’t opened it in ages and when I did need an IDE something like Zed was more than sufficient.

    • gwerbin 16 minutes ago
      I thought so too until I learned that there is a dedicated worktree switcher hidden away as a tab in the GitHub pain. Now I can open each worktree in a separate window as if it were its own project. Maybe that's not everyone's ideal work though, but it's exactly what I want 99% of the time.

      But I don't use it for AI assistant development, it's definitely meant for humans and not AI agents.

    • kowbell 30 minutes ago
      I also have to work in multiple workspaces simultaneously, and it drives me up the wall every time one of my IDE windows freezes (sometimes even just from inserting a Tab), because now ALL of them are frozen.
    • nimchimpsky 11 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • photios 3 minutes ago
    Interested in the SPEC.md format and workflow. Where can I learn more?

    Also... why bun?! I just finished purging it from all my systems, ha! It'd be cool to have plain pnpm support.

  • VMG 1 hour ago
    It feels like the day after I got comfortable with jj everybody become obsessed with git worktrees
    • rOOb85 16 minutes ago
      What’s jj in this context?
      • rumblefrog 14 minutes ago
      • hn8726 11 minutes ago
        It's a wrapper around git, compatible with git repos but supposedly easier to use
        • sunshowers 6 minutes ago
          No, jj is not a wrapper around git. It is a source control system of its own that has git as one of at least two production backends. This distinction matters because git wrappers don't tend to have fundamental concepts of their own like the operation and evolution logs.
    • mpalmer 1 hour ago
      The latest version of jj supports colocated git worktrees as part of its workspaces feature.
      • phildenhoff 58 minutes ago
        Finally!! Can’t wait for git lfs support to land, and I can move back to mostly using jj
        • nicce 35 minutes ago
          What are the benefits of jj if in the end everything is still on git backend?
          • sunshowers 6 minutes ago
            It is more powerful and easier to use, for both humans and agents.
        • IshKebab 25 minutes ago
          Are they just going to copy LFS? That's a real shame. I had some hope they would do something that isn't as shit. Oh well.

          I guess they'll just copy submodules too. Kind of feels like there's little point using it if it's just going to copy Git's mistakes.

  • collimarco 53 minutes ago
    Running agents outside containers seems crazy to me... It should at least launch a sperate microVM or container for each agent / task.
  • aliasxneo 1 hour ago
    I'd have to be _strongly_ convinced to leave oh-my-pi and Paseo.
    • InsideOutSanta 36 minutes ago
      Yeah, now that agents are doing most of the work, and we want to give them as much freedom as possible to run code, take screenshots, click on things, etc, it really doesn't make much sense to have a setup where all of this happens on your local computer. IMO it makes more sense to have this hosted somewhere, and then have UIs that make this visible to you on your devices.
      • simpaticoder 22 minutes ago
        This sounds like a short-term strategy at best You only need an agent to click things long enough to build an API on top of the thing it's clicking on. And running a full windowed virtual machine is expensive!

        I'd also caution against saying things like llms are doing most of the work I don't think that's true. And where it is true it shouldn't be. These things are still new tech and they need a lot of hand holding and oversight still.

      • aliasxneo 23 minutes ago
        Exactly. They sit in their little world in my homelab and I control everything through networking and virtualization restrictions. They run on a beefy VM, can spawn their own VMs (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Windows, even macOS on an old mac mini), run their own browsers, access their own secrets, etc. There's no way I would go back to agentic development on my local machine anymore.
    • dr_kiszonka 18 minutes ago
      I am curious about Pi, but my experience with a seemingly more fully-featured Hermes has been endless tinkering and fixing minor issues. Have your experience been at all similar?
      • aliasxneo 0 minutes ago
        I've been using it without thinking much about it for 3 months now. Have yet to run into any bugs or strange behaviors. But bear in mind I'm using oh-my-pi, not Pi. I found the latter to be mostly useless in terms of what I needed for my day to day work. I'm sure I could tinker with it to get it right, but that's literally what oh-my-pi is doing for you. And like I said, zero problems thus far.
    • mcrowder65 25 minutes ago
      Paseo!! :goat:
  • tylerritchie 1 hour ago
  • troupo 1 hour ago
    It's interesting to see that the README is much less CLAUDE-y than the abomination that currently runs at https://thinkrail.ai/

    Also, reading through their "SPECS".... https://github.com/JetBrains/thinkrail/blob/d299f20d2ba014f3... or https://github.com/JetBrains/thinkrail/blob/d299f20d2ba014f3...

    How is this llm-vomit "specs that are ground truth" etc.?

    • woadwarrior01 1 hour ago
      The README has plenty of Claude-isms too.
  • zahrevsky 1 hour ago
    > We built a rich interface around the pi coding agent

    This is exactly what I was missing

  • fellowniusmonk 1 hour ago
    This is moving in the direction towards a final interface, very good.

    There aren't enough digital french cleat systems.

    The true benefit of a French cleat isn't storage or organizing the way a fiddly pegboard and hanger approach uses, it's the ability to move all tools for a specific project onto a single rail without having to fiddle around, reducing friction for engaging and re-engaging with a project.

    • owl_might_ 1 hour ago
      Just out of curiosity, what is a French cleat? I've only found references to building (real) shelves on Google.
      • Jtsummers 1 hour ago
        That's what it is, it's basically two boards with angled cuts to match. One mounted to the wall, the other to the thing you want to hang from the wall. No fasteners needed other than for those two attachments (or more if you use more boards). Gives you some flexibility in arranging things in a shop (or, that's my reason for using it with our 2-car garage).
  • yoyohello13 57 minutes ago
    Looks interesting, but they need to clean up the claudese in those bullet points holy crap. It's like they purposely want the "what you get" section to be as obtuse as possible.
  • hsuduebc2 1 hour ago
    This is a great step. JetBrains integration of AI agents inside their ides is horrendously clunky.
    • tclancy 52 minutes ago
      I have multiple CLAUDE.md instructions about why using the terminal in JetBrains will burn the agent badly.
      • WesleyJohnson 38 minutes ago
        Can you expand on this? I genuinely don't know and I use claude code in a terminal in PyCharm daily.
  • qcarlisle 32 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • rfgplk 45 minutes ago
    > TypeScript followed by a myriad other (objectively) slow languages

    JetBrains, explain concisely why this isn't written in C/C++/Rust?

    • yoyohello13 41 minutes ago
      Very likely because Pi is written in TypeScript and Pi plugins are expected to be TS. TS is becoming the one true language. Best get used to it.
    • troupo 13 minutes ago
      Because it's just slapping web-based Monaco editor on top of pi which is written in Typescript.
  • oDot 51 minutes ago
    I do not get the appeal of web-based GUIs now that we have LLMs.

    Migrating my screenwriting software[0] from OpenTUI to Roc thought me what were once rough edges that take a lot of time are now just a prompt away from a solution.

    It now uses 10x less RAM, bundle is half the size, and my initial implementation is 700-800 fps for scrolling and 200 fps for writing.

    Granted, a TUI is less complex than a full-blown GUI, but I built a Roc Iced platform just as easily that abstracted Iced flux away

    [0]: https://blisswriter.app/

    • Aurornis 0 minutes ago
      JetBrains UIs aren't web-based, unless this is an exception.

      JetBrains tools are heavier and can take a few seconds to launch, but they also have some of the most responsive typing out there. They did some good work on zero-latency typing modes when that was a big topic and they were very good at typing latency relative to most editors.

      They will never be the right tool for the personality type that gets angry when their IDE takes a few seconds to launch at the beginning of the day or when an application takes more than 1GB of RAM, but I am not that type of person so I enjoy them.

      I think the TUI people are well served by vim or emacs and should just stay there and be happy.

      The rest of your post feels like an injected ad for your project underneath a topic where it's not relevant

    • 14u2c 12 minutes ago
      Jetbrains software is not web-based.
    • someothherguyy 47 minutes ago
      for people who still code. why do you need them not to?
      • oDot 33 minutes ago
        I do code -- the app logic. I also am well aware of what the infrastructure code does, I just don't type any of it myself.

        Even if I wanted not to code it I couldn't. LLMs are still incapable of creating code up to any decent standard.

        Also, while I do the get the joy of programming, we sometimes forget to focus on the user. You being happy to have typed the whole thing once, and have it run everywhere via the magic of browsers may not be the best strategy if this means your user's lap will be overheating.

        In the end as much as I like coding I would prefer my users' experience to be the best it can be. LLM assisted code delivers this better and faster than hand-typing it all (which in turn is better than completely vibecoding it)