JetBrains launches Air, an ‘open system’ for agentic development
Agent orchestration inside its IDEs, Air Teams and Air Governance, with any ACP agent (Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Junie)
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 11 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra145 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.584 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash175 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7114 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 84 days before it.
Key facts
- Announced Sept 22, 2026 on the JetBrains blog; JetBrains calls it the company’s move beyond the individual developer workbench it has focused on for 26 years
- Air in IDEs EAP (October 2026): agent work in sessions, local or cloud execution, temporary worktrees for parallel tasks, tabs/terminal/chat UIs; via JetBrains Marketplace plugin or built into 2026.3 EAP builds; free Junie Lite tier, third-party subscriptions usable
- Air Governance is the former JetBrains Central (launched July 2026), whose CLI tracks agent usage and token budgets
- Background (JetBrains blog, Aug 2026): JetBrains’ internal AI development spend rose about 10x in six months as developers used 3-5 AI tools a month; it moved to an enterprise Claude plan after reaching 150 Claude Code seats
- Quotes: ‘AI can produce code. Organizations still have to produce software.’ ‘Agentic development is becoming the norm, and an IDE that keeps agents at arm’s length will struggle to stay relevant.’
What happened
JetBrains repositioned its product line around orchestrating coding agents rather than chatting with one assistant. It keeps the IDE as the place where humans verify agent work, and it opened the system to rival agents through ACP.
Why it matters
The largest independent IDE maker now treats multi-agent orchestration and governance of AI spend as its core product. This follows the wider 2026 shift from AI-assisted to agent-driven software development.
Sources
5 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 3 primary, 2 press
Primary
- JetBrains: Introducing JetBrains Air (Sept 22, 2026)blog.jetbrains.com, official
- JetBrains AI blog: A new agentic experience, JetBrains Air in IDEs, EAP now openblog.jetbrains.com, official
- JetBrains AI blog: Our first moves to get AI spend under control (Aug 2026)blog.jetbrains.com, official
Press
- InfoWorld: JetBrains unveils JetBrains Air for agentic software developmentinfoworld.com, press
- The New Stack: JetBrains Airthenewstack.io, press
Changes
- Filed (found on blog.jetbrains.com/ai while checking lab pages)