JetBrains has announced an update to its AI features, with some changes for developers who use JetBrains IDEs.
The biggest change is the introduction of a new free version of JetBrains AI. Previously, most AI Assistant features that use cloud models required a paid subscription. Now, the company is making these AI capabilities more accessible to everyone.
Two separate tools
The revamped subscription model brings the AI Assistant and Junie together under one plan with Free, Pro, and Ultimate tiers. JetBrains AI Assistant and Junie are two separate tools. The AI Assistant provides assistance such as suggestions, explanations, and code snippets within a context. Junie, on the other hand, works more autonomously and is able to plan and execute multi-step code tasks within a project.
With the release of 2025.1, users of JetBrains IDEs have access to all JetBrains AI features via the free version. This free tier includes unlimited code completion and support for local AI models. This allows users to leverage some AI features without an internet connection via tools such as Ollama or LM Studio. In addition, a limited quota is available for features that depend on third-party cloud models. This gives users a taste of more powerful capabilities.
No additional costs for JetBrains AI Pro
There is more news for subscribers to the All Products Pack or the dotUltimate bundle. JetBrains AI Pro is now included in these subscriptions at no additional cost. The Pro version offers a larger quota for features that use external cloud models. These include AI chat, editing multiple files at once, and code generation. This is in addition to smart workflows for tasks such as refactoring, creating unit tests, and generating commit messages.
The AI Assistant has also been updated. A notable change is improved context awareness. The AI now better understands entire projects and uses advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to find the most relevant files, methods, and classes for its answers. It also takes into account the files that the user has recently opened, so interactions are more relevant to the user’s activities. Users now also have more control over which files the AI can see, with the ability to add or remove attachments.
Based on this improved context, JetBrains also introduced a beta feature for editing multiple files at once. This allows the AI Assistant to suggest changes that affect multiple files within a project, which can save a lot of time when implementing new features or refactorings that affect different parts of the code. Here, too, RAG is used to determine which files are most relevant to the requested change.
Read also: JetBrains launches AI agent Junie for programming assistance