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The decline of Intellij's quality

It takes a lot to make something that people love, too little to throw everything out of the window and way more than the beginning to win the trust back.

This does not only apply to software, we can also look at the current state of Boeing.

Intellij currently has become a bloated product with many features, but at the same time the enormous quality it once provided has dramatically declined and it seems that the focus of the company has changed.

It just worked

The last 10 years that i have been using Jetbrains’s IDEs i never had problems with its performance. This includes Intellij, Webstorm, Rider and Datagrip.

Navigation was snappy, the auto complete was clever, the refactoring capabilities were amazing and the IDE did not get into my way.

But something changed. I cannot pinpoint when the change happened, but the every new release is less reliable than the last one.

It does not work anymore

There are new bugs, old bugs that are not fixed, but the main issue for me is the decline of performance.

In order for me to work, i need tools that i use to be stable and fast and unfortunately lately Intellij is not either of them.

  1. It crashes frequently
  2. Indexes unexpectedly become corrupted
  3. Settings unexpectedly change by opening a different project (e.g the JDK of the project)
  4. Imports break and now the project does not compile

These are one of the most common issues i frequently face. They are annoying but they can be handled by changing the settings, invalidating the cache and then waiting again for the whole indexing operation.

What cannot be handled though is that the IDE has become very sluggish. The problem becomes more visible when you use snappy and performant software alongside with Intellij, Vim and window managers for example.

These tools just work and are fast. They do have less features than an IDE indeed, but at this point it just feels that less is more.

I prefer software that is functional with less features rather than tools full of features that are broken.

Your hardware is problematic

I agree, this could have been a valid reason for all these problems. Though the fact that the past years i have used and, been using

  1. A macbook pro M1 with 16GB ram
  2. A Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 with 32GB ram (linux)
  3. A Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen12 with 64GB ram (linux)
  4. A desktop with ryzen 3600 and 32GB ram (linux)

and still facing these issues makes me believe that the hardware is not the problem here.

The AI hype train

Unfortunately Jetbrains didn’t escape the AI curse that we have been witnessing the past years.

Instead they actively participate in it with the highlight of them adding their assistant and users being unable to disable it.

Reading that thread shows that the company ignored their customers and did something a lot of people did not ask for. I do understand that some people find value in these tools but being force to use them? That seems like a serious issue in my eyes.

Jetbrains as a company with a very strong software culture, should have known better how to handle this hype train and instead, focus on the quality of their products.

The problem does not stop there though, Jetbrains invests even more in this hype train by adding full line completion, an assistant while neglecting important parts of their products such as their performance.

Do not use Intellij

I do like Intellij, it was a very good tool but im primarily a vim user. So when feasible, i do not use it.

The problem though is that i work with Kotlin at my job which means that i can’t use something else other than Intellij. For those unaware, Kotlin is developed by Jetbrains.

Jebrains obviously does not want to lose their leverage on selling IDE subscriptions for the language they develop and thus they do not want to support an Language Server Protocol initiative, which means that i am out of options.

Last remarks

This post is not to bash Jetbrains or its employees. They have much more clever people than me working there and I’m sure that the current situation is not a fault of the engineers.

Although i face a lot of issues, it should be noted that the debugger keeps its top quality so far which means that there is still some quality in the product.

Maybe the company will get back on the track and focus on what they have been doing the best for 2 decades, building powerful and reliable IDEs for professionals.

Maybe this is not an option anymore in their plans and eventually i will have to work professionally with other languages.

In case the latter happens, i will miss the debugger and the refactoring capabilities, but if it means that compiling a simple Kotlin project needs 14 cores with 100% cpu usage together with more than 5GB of RAM then not using it is a sacrifice im willing to make.