JetBrains has announced Junie, its new AI coding agent, in closed preview. Junie, says the company, is able to carry through the coding tasks you assign it and leverage the knowledge about your project context as available in the IDE.
According to JetBrains, you can ask Junie to “implement CRUD operations to manage bookmarks with user interface”. Junie will then collect all relevant context information and devise a series of steps to carry the task through, including analyzing your project structure, checking for any required dependencies, checking for existing tests that should pass, creating any required source files, running tests, and so on.
At the end of the process, Junie will confirm if there are any known limitations to the proposed solution, which you can review and/or modify and eventually accept or reject. Junie can also create tests for an existing program, run inspections, and more.
The company says that Junie is able to solve 53.6% of tasks in the SWEBench Verified benchmark, which includes over 500 programming tasks. While it is not currently in the top ten in the SWEBench Verified leaderboard, JetBrains says this is a promising start showing Junie’s potential.
Junie is currently available for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and PyCharm Professional on macOS and Linux while other IDEs of the JetBrains’ family will be supported soon. Supported languages includes Python, Java, and Kotlin at the moment of this writing. As mentioned, Junie is a closed preview you can apply to.
Coding agents can be seen as an evolution of AI coding assistants, which focus on proposing code completions or refactoring interactively in the editor window based on the user’s prompt. For example, a coding Assistant can suggest how to implement a method from its signature or a comment, write documentation for a method, and so on.
An AI agent is instead thought of as being able to carry tasks through in a more autonomous way. This different approach is somewhat reflected by the shift from “assisting” developers to “collaborating” with them.
JetBrains is not the first company to launch an AI coding agent, an arena where many major as well as minor players are active. Among the major players, AWS recently added agent capabilities to its Q Developer assistant; Google launched its Gemini 2.0-based Jules agent; and GitHub provides GPT-4 Turbo-based Copilot Workspace. However, the list of AI coding agents is much larger and includes W&B Programmer O1 crosscheck5, Blackbox AI Agent, CodeStory Midwit Agent + swe-search, all of them in the top ten of SWEBench’s Verified leaderboard, Emergent.ai, and many more.
JetBrains launched its integrated AI Assistant in 2023 with mixed results, with some developers praising its capabilities and others criticizing it. Other coding assistants currently available are GitHub Copilot, Google Code Assist, AWS CodeWhisperer, and others.
