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JetBrains Built an Open-Source IDE for Pi — Here's Why I'm Not Convinced
Programmers from the era of hand-coding have all installed JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PhpStorm, or PyCharm. Honestly, they're genuinely good to use, but the software licenses are genuinely not cheap either.
The Vibe Coding era, however, has completely overturned the design philosophy and usage habits of traditional programming IDEs (Integrated Development Environment), with various ADEs (Agentic Development Environments) popping up one after another. JetBrains has also been constantly trying to find new breakthroughs, and the open-source ThinkRail introduced today is one of JetBrains' attempts. Although it already has 3.2k+ stars on GitHub, after installing and trying it out, I'm not very optimistic about it.
1 What is ThinkRail
This open-source project was initiated by JetBrains in late July this year and officially made public in late August. It's currently being updated quite frequently, basically releasing a new version every 1-2 days. Here's the introduction from the official website:
ThinkRail is the agentic IDE that gets better every time you use it — learning your project through living specs today, and building its own capabilities tomorrow.
We built a rich interface around the…
