JetBrains Air

JetBrains Air, announced on 22 September 2026, is JetBrains' attempt to make agentic coding an operable system rather than a chat box bolted onto an editor. It is deliberately not another proprietary agent. Air runs the agents developers already use — Claude Agent, Codex, Junie, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, and anything that speaks the Agent Client Protocol — and concerns itself with the parts nobody else owns: where the agent runs, how its output gets reviewed, and who pays for the tokens.

The same session is reachable from four surfaces. A plugin puts Air inside IntelliJ IDEA and the other JetBrains IDEs; air.jetbrains.cloud is the browser client; Air Gateway brings terminal agents such as Claude Code and Codex into the same system from the command line; and a mobile client lets you check on a run from a phone. Because the agent executes in a cloud environment rather than on your laptop, closing the lid does not stop the work, and a colleague can pick up a session you started.

For individual developers, Air in IDEs is the review layer. Several projects stay open at once, each with its own sessions and an unread count for changed files and outgoing commits. Air discovers ACP-compatible agents already installed on the machine and connects them in one click, or pulls new ones from an agent registry. Diffs open straight from a session into the IDE, where the usual static analysis and navigation apply and you can leave a line comment for the agent to act on — the screenshot-worthy detail being that "Rewrite this in Rust" is a note attached to line 1, not a new prompt. Air Context adds semantic indexing of the repository so an agent starts with a model of the project instead of grepping its way through a production-scale codebase, which is as much a cost control as a speed one.

Air Teams, in early access, moves that into shared cloud environments: per-project VMs whose size, internet access and secrets are managed centrally, MCP servers connected once for everyone, and automations that fire on repository events — an Agents.md updater on merge to main, an auto-rebaser when a branch falls behind, a code reviewer when a PR opens, issue triage, lint checks — each with its own run count and credit spend.

Air Governance is the organisational tier: which models and agents a team or individual may use, spending limits per team and per contributor, one set of provider keys (Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic or any other vendor) shared across the company, and analytics showing where AI credits actually go, broken down by consumer and by agent.

On cost, Air is unusually open: bring your own provider subscription, API key or even base URL and JetBrains charges nothing for the model calls, or use JetBrains AI credits billed at public API rates — and you can switch between them mid-session. Junie, JetBrains' own coding agent, is now part of Air. Cloud runs are rolling out gradually, available first to some customers in the IDEs and the browser.