JetBrains released new versions of its development environments, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and GoLand, on 5 November. The company said the most important change is Air, which it calls a new layer for agentic development.

Air is not an AI service in its own right, JetBrains says on its help page. It is a workspace where users launch and monitor coding agents. Air detects agents already installed on the machine, and users can add more from the JetBrains agent registry. The agents run on the user’s machine. Air controls ACP-compatible agents through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) and runs command-line agents in a dedicated terminal view.

Own subscriptions work, with one exception

Agents that work with Air include Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Junie and OpenCode, JetBrains said. Users can run them with a provider subscription, an API key or a custom base URL, and no JetBrains AI subscription is required. The Junie Lite configuration is free with a JetBrains Account.

A Claude subscription has one limitation: the help page says it cannot be used to authorise Claude Agent in the chat surface. That requires JetBrains AI or an Anthropic API key, billed separately. A Claude subscription can, however, run Claude Code in a terminal view, which Air opens as a tab the size of the whole editor.

When an agent uses a third-party subscription, code goes directly to that provider rather than through JetBrains, the help page states. Air does not enable AI features automatically.

Users review changes with the IDE’s own tools

Agent changes appear alongside the surrounding code. Users can attach a comment to a specific line in the diff and send it to the agent as feedback. They can accept, edit or revert each change. The Chinese site AICoder reported that JetBrains has said the Git worktrees used in parallel sessions only separate working directories and do not act as a security sandbox.

Users of the AI Assistant plugin can try Air. Switching hides AI Assistant, but it can be restored. Air migrates skills, MCP configuration, ACP agents, authentication and chat history, but history from AI Assistant’s Chat mode is not migrated. The help page calls Air an experiment, and AI Assistant remains supported as a separate plugin.

The new IDE versions also send error and UI freeze reports to JetBrains automatically. The company said it removes details such as file paths and usernames from report messages. The GoLand announcement noted, however, that reports may contain stack traces and system information, and that sensitive data is masked where possible. Reporting can be switched off under Settings | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings | Data Sharing.

Air comes built into the 2026.3 versions. For 2026.2, users can install it from JetBrains Marketplace. No separate licence is needed, but Air does not work in Android Studio. Organisations can restrict which agents are available in JetBrains Console or JetBrains IDE Services.