JetBrains folds its agent tools into one brand, Air

Kirill Skrygan, the CEO of JetBrains, called it "one of the most significant steps in our 26-year history." As The New Stack reports, most of what he described is a new name for work the company has shipped since March: JetBrains Air now covers agents inside the IDE, shared cloud workspaces and company-wide controls, and it is built to run agents JetBrains did not write.

At a glance

• JetBrains announced on Tuesday that Air is now an open system of three parts: Air in the IDEs, Air Teams, and Air Governance, which is the new name for JetBrains Central.
• Developers can supervise several agent sessions at once, including Claude Code and Codex brought in through Air Gateway, then review the resulting changes with JetBrains' own IDE tooling.
• A lot of it is unfinished: Air Teams and Air Governance are early access only, and the Air Alpha plugin warns of rough edges and updates roughly every week.

If you have not been following, Air debuted in public preview in March as a standalone "agentic development environment," first on macOS, running Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI and JetBrains' Junie side by side. Junie also left the IDE as Junie CLI, for terminals, CI/CD systems and other editors. Weeks later came JetBrains Central, controls for companies running many agents, and in July AI for Teams and Organizations added shared context, cloud agents, automations and cost controls.

Skrygan splits Air into three parts, and one of them is JetBrains Central renamed

Skrygan unveiled the umbrella on LinkedIn on Tuesday, calling Air an "open system of products for agentic software development" that works "inside and beyond JetBrains IDEs." In a separate blog post the same day he listed three parts: Air in JetBrains IDEs, for directing agents and checking their work; Air Teams, for coordinating developers and autonomous agents; and Air Governance, for policy, auditing, costs and AI use across a company.

Air Governance is the new name for JetBrains Central. The original Air desktop app still exists as a standalone application, now on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a browser-based version for organizations. So "Air" names two things at once: a dedicated agentic development environment and the banner over the whole collection.

Air Gateway brings Claude Code and Codex into the same view

You can reach Air in three ways: inside JetBrains IDEs, in the browser, and from the command line through Air Gateway, which brings terminal agents such as Claude Code and Codex into Air. For a single developer the pitch is supervision. You keep several projects and agent sessions running and track new activity, changed files and outgoing commits as they appear.

Air Teams moves some of that work into shared cloud environments, so a task is not tied to one person's machine. Teams can set up recurring automations and centrally manage the environments and external tools agents may use. Air Governance decides which models and agents developers can reach, sets permissions and spending limits, and tracks AI usage across teams.

Both Air Teams and Air Governance are offered only through JetBrains' early access program for now. JetBrains also plans to bring Air to mobile, where developers would be able to monitor and continue agent work away from their desktop.

The IDE piece has been public as Air Alpha since early August

The IDE part of Air is not new either. JetBrains has been testing the Air Alpha plugin since at least early August, running and supervising multiple coding agents inside IntelliJ-based IDEs and showing their changes as native IDE diffs. An update earlier this month added more controls for monitoring and steering agent sessions.

JetBrains is candid about the label. The plugin is an early iteration being built while Air itself rolls out, and users should expect "rough edges, changes to the UI and behavior, and updates roughly every week."

"Our IDEs will continue to be where professional developers work with agents, understand and verify code, and make the decisions that shape what ships."

Skrygan says JetBrains has historically "focused primarily on the individual developer workbench," and Air widens that to the place where agentic work is started, carried out, coordinated, reviewed and governed. "The IDE remains important to JetBrains' future," he writes.

Air sits above Claude Code, Codex and Junie instead of replacing them

The design is easiest to read as layers. At the bottom sit the agents themselves, whether Junie, Claude Code, Codex or something else. Above them, Air tracks each session with its changed files and commits; the IDE is where a human reads the diff and decides; Air Teams moves sessions to shared cloud machines; and Air Governance sets who may use which model and how much they may spend.

Picture a restaurant kitchen staffed by cooks from different agencies. JetBrains is not supplying every cook here; Air is the pass where plates get checked, plus the rota and the budget book. Skrygan puts it in his own terms: Air "cannot be just another agent or development environment" and must stay "open to the tools and agents developers choose, including those JetBrains does not build."

The announcement is heavier on structure than on detail: no pricing is given, the two company-facing layers are early access, and the IDE plugin is an alpha that changes weekly. In our view, the naming is the weakest choice, since "Air" now means both a standalone desktop app and the umbrella above it, so "we use Air" no longer tells you which. The broader bet appears to be that reviewing agent output, more than generating it, keeps the IDE central.

When Teams and Governance leave early access

No date has been given for Air Teams or Air Governance to leave early access, for the mobile version, or for a stable successor to Air Alpha. The nearest checkpoint is the plugin itself. With updates arriving roughly every week, its release notes are where you will see whether the controls for steering agent sessions keep growing, and how much of Skrygan's IDE-centred system actually ships.