Standard
An open standard for connecting AI coding agents to editors and IDEs, enabling interoperable agent integrations across tools like Zed and JetBrains.
JetBrains opened early access to Air, a plugin and 2026.3 EAP feature that runs a developer's existing coding agents as parallel sessions inside its IDEs. Air needs no JetBrains AI subscription, so a team can trial multi-agent work on the agent plans it already pays for.
Reality
Six months after introducing JetBrains Central, JetBrains has renamed it Air Governance and made it the place an organization sees and caps what agents from any vendor cost it. The IDE becomes one surface of several.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
A developer who builds one of the six persistent memory systems he checked walks through how each can stop sharing while Cursor and Claude Code both report a healthy connection. The split happens at the account, and nothing logs it.
Reality
Pengcheng Xu's AgentConnect comparison finds semantic navigation beats grep only where text search is noisy; on clean repositories it added 16 to 19 percent to token cost for little or no accuracy gain.
Reality
Block, xAI and Nous all landed on the agent as a persistent identity. That identity still lives in whatever file the harness picked, and the switching bill is now memory.
Reality
Block open-sourced the desktop app its own teams use to drive agents. The design claim underneath it is that active context should be inspectable, not archaeology in a prompt log.
Reality
JetBrains reports 90% of professional developers use coding agents weekly. The number that matters for tooling bets is not adoption but conversion, where Claude Code is far ahead.
Reality
A Rust and GPUI desktop app drives CLIs from seven providers, pairs every prompt with a hidden Git checkpoint, and keeps its records on disk. The hard part will be adapter maintenance.
Reality