JetBrains CEO Kirill Skrygan on Tuesday formally introduced JetBrains Air as an "open system of products for agentic software development" designed to operate both inside and outside the company's IDEs. The announcement consolidates several recent initiatives under one brand, addressing how developers and organizations can coordinate work with autonomous coding agents like Claude, Codex, and JetBrains' own Junie. Skrygan described the move as "one of the most significant steps" in the company's 26-year history.
The Air system brings together three main components that JetBrains has been building over recent months. Air in JetBrains IDEs lets developers direct agents and inspect their output using native IDE tools. Air Teams, still in early access, provides shared cloud environments where teams can collaborate on projects, run agent tasks without relying on individual machines, configure recurring automations, and centrally manage the environments and external tools available to agents. Air Governance, the rebranded version of JetBrains Central launched earlier this year, offers organization-level controls including model and agent access decisions, permissions, spending limits, and usage tracking across teams. The original Air desktop application, first released in public preview in March as a standalone agentic development environment for macOS, remains available as a desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, alongside a browser-based version for organizations. JetBrains also plans to extend Air to mobile devices, allowing developers to monitor and continue agent work away from their desktops.
According to Skrygan, JetBrains Air "cannot be just another agent or development environment" but must instead connect products for individual work, team coordination, organizational control, context, and process automation while staying open to the tools and agents developers choose, including those JetBrains doesn't build. The company has been testing the Air Alpha plugin since at least early August, giving developers a way to run and supervise multiple coding agents directly inside IntelliJ-based IDEs and review the changes they produce using native IDE tooling. An updated release earlier this month added more controls for monitoring and steering agent sessions. Skrygan writes that the company has historically "focused primarily on the individual developer workbench," but Air broadens its scope to encompass the wider environment in which agentic work is started, carried out, coordinated, reviewed, and governed.
The announcement reflects JetBrains' response to a fundamental shift in where software development happens. AI coding agents have increasingly pulled work away from traditional IDEs into terminals, desktop applications, and remote environments, raising questions about the future role of integrated development environments for a company that built its reputation on products like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and WebStorm. JetBrains maintains that IDEs will remain central to professional development, particularly as developers are asked to manage growing volumes of AI-generated code that humans need to review, debug, and verify. Skrygan writes that the company's IDEs "will continue to be where professional developers work with agents, understand and verify code, and make the decisions that shape what ships," while JetBrains Air extends that control across the broader system developing around them. The company concedes that Air Alpha is very much an early iteration it's building while it rolls out JetBrains Air itself, and users should expect "rough edges, changes to the UI and behavior, and updates roughly every week." The platform's willingness to accommodate external agents alongside its own tooling may determine whether organizations see it as infrastructure or simply another vendor option. For companies already managing multiple AI coding tools, the value proposition hinges less on any individual agent and more on whether centralized governance and coordination justify adopting yet another layer in an increasingly crowded stack.