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IntelliJ IDEA is JetBrains' integrated development environment, primarily for Java and Kotlin, offering code analysis, refactoring, and debugging tools.
Netflix and JetBrains report that a headless IntelliJ code engine made Claude Code and Codex typically 20 to 30% more efficient, up to about 65%. Netflix wrote the daemon that keeps the index warm because JetBrains had not shipped one.
Reality
JetBrains now recommends Kotlin Toolchain 0.13 for most new Kotlin Multiplatform projects, the same year it promoted the tool to Alpha. Teams starting a KMP app now have to weigh a pre-1.0 CLI whose main argument is that it sets up each platform's tools for them.
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JetBrains' Kotlin 2.5.0-Beta1 adds an off-by-default mode that stops Multiplatform common code from compiling against dependencies' platform-only declarations. With the flag on, builds reject the calls IntelliJ already flags as unresolved, so KMP teams are better off finding that breakage on a branch first.
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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
JetBrains' walkthrough finds a discount bug in a containerised gRPC server by attaching a debugger on port 5005 and editing log expressions between requests. Those expressions run inside the server's VM.
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JEP 527's hybrid key exchange landed as a stable feature on September 15, and the same JDK makes G1 the collector on small machines and cuts every object header to 64 bits. Serial is still one flag away.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
A refactor that moved no logic changed how Microsoft Defender treats the binary, because the trust rules follow the install path. JetBrains published the ETW harness, so the cost is measurable on your own machines.
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The IDE stays a Windows process while a small Linux-side agent does the file and process work. That is the fourth architecture JetBrains has tried for WSL, and the first one it names as the recommended entry point.
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JetBrains walks through virtual threads, scoped values and structured concurrency in the IDE, opening on a cancelled future whose work keeps running. Two of the three features are stable in shipped JDKs; the third is on its seventh preview.
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The plugin that used to exist only in Rider now lands in IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm and WebStorm. It removes the local observability backend from the setup cost, not the SDK work.
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JetBrains' configuration guidance lists four property sources and three tiers of value. The load-bearing rule is the second criterion: refuse to boot when a required value is absent.
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A dev.to write-up of a JetBrains Rider demo setup is really a list of options you can set days early. Calm hands are a by-product, not the method.
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