JetBrains folds its agent tools into one brand, Air

JetBrains on September 22 brought its agent products together under one name, JetBrains Air. CEO Kirill Skrygan called the move “one of the most significant steps in our 26-year history” in a LinkedIn post. He describes Air as an “open system of products for agentic software development” that works “inside and beyond JetBrains IDEs.”

Most of what now carries the name had already shipped. The New Stack calls Air a repackaging of several strands of JetBrains’ recent AI work: an agent experience inside the IDEs, tooling to coordinate developers with autonomous agents, and company-level controls. In a separate blog post, Skrygan splits the system into three parts. Air in JetBrains IDEs is for directing agents and checking their work. Air Teams coordinates work between developers and autonomous agents. Air Governance, the new name for JetBrains Central, covers policy, auditing, costs and AI use across a company.

Six months of separate launches

The Air name first appeared on March 9, on a standalone “agentic development environment” released as a free public preview. It ran only on macOS at first, with Windows and Linux promised later. Developers could run Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI and JetBrains’ own Junie side by side, using either a JetBrains AI subscription or their own agent-provider subscriptions and API keys, with Anthropic’s excepted, as the JetBrains blog put it at launch. Junie left the IDE the same day. Junie CLI, a standalone agent in beta that works with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Grok, made it available in terminals, CI/CD systems and other editors.

A couple of weeks later JetBrains launched Central, a system aimed higher up the organization at companies running several coding agents. In July came AI for Teams and Organizations, which added shared context, cloud agents, automations, and organization-wide governance and cost controls that could sit above whatever AI tools developers were already using. The IDE piece came last. The Air Alpha plugin, which runs and supervises multiple coding agents inside IntelliJ-based IDEs, has been in testing since at least early August, and an update earlier in September added more controls for monitoring and steering agent sessions.

Tuesday’s announcement folds all of that into one brand without retiring the original app. The standalone Air desktop environment now runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and there is a browser-based version for organizations. That leaves “Air” naming two things: the dedicated agentic environment, and the umbrella over the products around it.

How Air handles several agents at once

Air reaches developers in three places: inside JetBrains IDEs, in the browser, and on the command line through Air Gateway, which brings terminal agents such as Claude Code and Codex into Air. For an individual developer, the work is supervision. Several projects and agent sessions can run at the same time while Air tracks new activity, changed files and outgoing commits. The resulting changes are reviewed with JetBrains’ IDE tooling, and the Alpha plugin shows agent edits as native IDE diffs.

The underlying mechanics come from the March product. A task can point at a specific line, commit, class, method or other symbol, which gives the agent exact context in place of a block of pasted text. Agents run locally by default. They can also run inside Docker containers and Git worktrees, which are separate checkouts of the same repository, so each agent is sandboxed and several can work in parallel. The user looks at one task at a time and gets a notification when another session needs attention.

Outside agents connect through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which Air supported from launch, and more ACP agents are added through the ACP Agent Registry. The Register described ACP as a vendor-neutral protocol for communication between agents and editors, sponsored by Zed and JetBrains. Air itself is built on Fleet, the environment JetBrains once conceived as a companion to IntelliJ IDEA and possibly its eventual replacement, which never made it out of preview.

Skrygan presents openness as a requirement. “JetBrains Air cannot be just another agent or development environment,” he writes. In his words, it has to connect individual work, team coordination, organizational control, context and process automation, and “remain open to the tools and agents developers choose, including those JetBrains does not build.”

What can you use today?

Air Teams is still in early access. It moves agent work into shared cloud environments, so a task doesn’t depend on one person’s machine. Developers can collaborate on projects there, set up recurring automations, and centrally manage which environments and external tools agents can reach. Air Governance is also available only through JetBrains’ early access program for now. It controls which models and agents developers can use, sets permissions and spending limits, and tracks AI usage across teams.

JetBrains describes Air Alpha as an early iteration that it is building while Air itself rolls out, and tells users to expect “rough edges, changes to the UI and behavior, and updates roughly every week.” A mobile version is planned, so developers can monitor and continue agent work away from their desktops.

Where the IDE fits

JetBrains has argued that the IDE will stay at the core of professional development as developers review, debug and verify growing amounts of AI-generated code. In March the company drew the line this way: IDEs add tools to the code editor, while Air builds tools around the agent. It also said complex codebases weren’t yet ready for purely agentic coding, so Air would orchestrate agents without replacing existing workflows. Skrygan now says the company has historically “focused primarily on the individual developer workbench,” and that Air extends its reach to the places where agentic work is started, carried out, coordinated, reviewed and governed.

When Air launched, The Register said JetBrains would have a difficult time balancing two things: loyal IntelliJ IDEA customers who don’t want to move to a different product, and a new AI-centric environment. It added that the market is increasingly fragmented, with model providers such as Anthropic building their own tools.

Skrygan’s post puts the IDE at the point where agent work gets checked. “Our IDEs will continue to be where professional developers work with agents, understand and verify code, and make the decisions that shape what ships,” he writes. “JetBrains Air extends that control across the broader system developing around them.”