JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

&gt;<i>a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved</i><p>That shouldn&#x27;t be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product&#x2F;service&#x2F;whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable signal. Preferably, they would reply to reviews and say &quot;XYZ was addressed in update ABC&quot; or something.<p>Nuking reviews is a valuable signal as well, I guess. Just not in the way that they hope. Knowing that they&#x27;ve done that has (further) lowered my impression of them.

Deleted comment cited by the author:<p>“ I previously submitted a review critiquing this plugin, but it was removed by JetBrains moderation — an unfortunate decision that, in my view, undermines trust in open feedback. I have now tested the latest AI plugin (v243.23654.270.16). The plugin does offer limited support for third-party providers like Ollama and LM Studio (the latter being a better fit for most local LLM users). However, this support is restricted to chat interactions only — not to autocomplete, inline suggestions, or in-editor refactoring tools. In practice, this limitation significantly reduces the plugin’s value for users who already maintain ChatGPT Pro accounts or local LLM workflows. Rather than fully enabling local model integration, the design seems oriented toward promoting JetBrains’ proprietary cloud models and subscription services. Specific ratings: • Integration with IDE: 5 stars — Excellent UI integration into JetBrains products, smooth setup. • Performance: 1 star — Noticeable latency compared to local models; frequent delays. • Available Features: 1 star — Limited flexibility for serious LLM users; core features locked to cloud services. • User Interface: 1 star — Chat feels bolted-on rather than deeply native; inconsistent UX across project types. • Documentation Quality: 1 star — The documentation exists but feels sparse, with limited guidance on third-party setup and unclear disclosures about feature limitations. While some users may find the plugin sufficient for lightweight AI chat, in my assessment, it falls short both in technical flexibility and in respecting user choice. Thank you to JetBrains for providing the opportunity to share my neutral and unbiased observations with fellow developers” [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&#x2F;plugin&#x2F;22282-jetbrains-ai-assistant&#x2F;reviews#116867" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plugins.jetbrains.com&#x2F;plugin&#x2F;22282-jetbrains-ai-assi...</a>

&gt; The spokesperson added that the company could have done better<p>They seem to have to say that a lot about this product, yet they don&#x27;t really seem to learn any lessons. When the original flood of bad reviews came it it was because they made that plugin bundled with the IDE and then had a &quot;bug&quot; where it couldn&#x27;t be effectively removed. There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. They then walked that back with the same &quot;we could have done better&quot;.<p>This is more of the same. The &quot;AI Assistant&quot; still lives on the default side bar regardless if you have that plugin installed or not.<p>At this point, they know they could do better yet are choosing not to.

I&#x27;m really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work&#x2F;personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by existing users.

The second a better product comes along I&#x27;m moving away from Jetbrains. Unfortunately I think we&#x27;re about to get into an IDE winter since everything thinks all problems should just be solved by AI rather than doing the hard work like &quot;good refactoring tools&quot; and &quot;acceptable user experience&quot;.

They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI.<p>Not sure why it’s so hard for them to catch up with Cursor. They have everything they need but somehow they focus on just something that they don’t have much expertise, building models instead of better integration. It’s a shame seeing such good product going downhill considering AI is becoming fundamental for dev productivity.

Not great. Any other company would have been put on my greedy-morons list. But i believe JetBrains is special and is allowed more mistakes than others.<p>I also believe they should really stay calm and not get sucked into the AI hype. Worst case they will be the heroes to the people who like to program for the joy of it, in case these AI IDEs should really take over (which i highly doubt).

I love JetBrains and hate vscode, but Cursor was such a huge productivity boost that I ended up switching. Unfortunately none of the JetBrains plugins (Junie, the older AI Assistant, Windsurf&#x2F;codeium, etc) come close yet :(

Not a good look. A better way would’ve been to add a response to the reviews (and notify the reviewers via eg email):<p>“Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”

I cancelled my JetBrains license a few days ago after I was required to agree to new terms and conditions, they expended no effort and took zero time to explain the changes, what has changed and why, I was shown a ridiculously long legal document and asked to agree or get fucked. There was no feedback option when cancelling the subscription, they clearly don&#x27;t care.

I used to be a fan of jb products since they used to give it out for free in college, and continued using it into my professional career (I loved the refactoring tools!). However, lately they have been adding too much junk to their IDEs.<p>Have switched to my very old workflow of using nvim and customizing it with NvChad.

The correct approach, IMO, is to try to incentivize re-review after the issues have been fixed. Not delete the negative reviews. If you want to prove you&#x27;re customer centric with your product and that you actually care, you can find a way to encourage them to change their vote.

It&#x27;s quite shocking to me how many people already told me to disable the annoying &quot;single line&quot; AI-completion if I ever were to try out a JetBrains IDE.<p>&gt; AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month<p>If it&#x27;s so expensive, why do they force it on everyone? Sure, a lot of folks want support for this, but enabling it by default is just annoying for their long-time users. Not to mention the costs of full AI-completion, I hope they don&#x27;t get the idea of also enabling that by default.

First thing I do with any jetbrain ide is kill that ai assistant. I&#x27;m paid to think.

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

Confirmed - it is an expensive turd. Windsurf IntelliJ plugin is better and faster at auto complete and has useful interactive natural langue interaction based coding features.

There is already a huge discussion going on about their big re-design last year, so I guess they are now feeling the burn with all the users leaving...

Junie is a much better agent than the AI Assistant and uses the same AI subscription plan, but Augment blows the doors off both of them.

Do third party plugin authors get this privilege, to remove reviews where they deem the mentioned issues solved?

From consumer perspective, I’m actually not against this probably. Would be nice to have way to give more weight to reviews relevant to current product version. Old reviews are very confusing for consumers since they basically provide false information about the product.

Soon we will have to pay premium to not have AI Assistants in our tools.

ugh that whole review thing is super sketchy, i really don&#x27;t get how they think that builds any trust

Noone would care in a week

IANAL but is this even legal despite recent curb on FTC?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;...</a>

Everyone is rigging reviews. Welcome to capitalism.

Yeah, unfortunately, they have to jump on the AI bandwagon because they are forced to by other editors, providing free AI, but they simply do not have the skills to integrate the AI properly. It&#x27;s a shame, and unfortunately removing negative reviews will not help as people will simply migrate to a different product. You can have three 5 star reviews, but that doesn&#x27;t help if nobody else is using it.