Agentic AI
JetBrains launches Air as unified platform for agentic development across IDEs, teams, and organizations
The IDE maker consolidates its AI-powered agent tools under one banner while insisting the traditional development environment remains central to professional workflows.
The New Stack
JetBrains has formally unveiled JetBrains Air, a comprehensive ecosystem designed to orchestrate autonomous coding agents alongside traditional developer workflows. The announcement represents what CEO Kirill Skrygan called "one of the most significant steps in our 26-year history," signaling the company's commitment to evolving beyond its core IDE business without abandoning it.
From fragmented tools to a unified system#
Rather than a single new product, Air consolidates several strands of JetBrains' recent work. The company has spent the past year releasing complementary tools: the Air desktop environment (launched in March 2026), Junie CLI for terminal-based agent access, JetBrains Central for organizational control, and AI for Teams governance capabilities. Tuesday's announcement simply groups these under one coherent brand while clarifying their relationships.
Three layers of agentic development#
The Air system operates across three distinct levels:
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Air in IDEs: An integrated plugin (currently in alpha) lets developers run multiple agents directly within IntelliJ-based editors, review generated code using native IDE diffing tools, and manage parallel agent sessions alongside traditional work.
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Air Teams: This cloud-based layer (early access) lets development groups coordinate agent work in shared environments, configure recurring automations, and centrally manage tools and permissions without tying work to individual machines.
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Air Governance: The organizational control layer provides policy enforcement, spending limits, model access restrictions, and usage auditing across teams.
Remaining platform-agnostic#
A defining characteristic of Air is its openness. Rather than locking developers into JetBrains' own Junie agent, the system supports Claude Agent, Google Codex, Gemini CLI, and other external tools. Developers can access agents through desktop apps (macOS, Windows, Linux), browsers, the command line via Air Gateway, and—coming soon—mobile applications for monitoring agent work remotely.
