Ditching GitHub Copilot: My Brief Experience with JetBrains AI Assistant
I cancelled GitHub Copilot for JetBrains AI Assistant, but asked for a refund after just a few hours. Between technical bugs and unsustainable pricing, it’s not yet a viable alternative. Read why I’m switching to Gemini Code Assist instead.
This is a very short post about my latest, brief experience with JetBrains AI Assistant. I took the courageous step of cancelling my GitHub Copilot subscription just to test it out, but after just a few hours, I asked for a refund. Here’s why.
Why I still love IntelliJ
Despite not being the youngest developer around, I’ve been using JetBrains IDEs daily for a long time. I hold an IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate license and love it because it just works, it’s polished, and feature-rich. I use it for Java, Go, JS development, and also for Infra as Code with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Flux.
That’s why I keep trying their AI offering every now and then. I’ve shared articles about it in the past, and back then, the main issues were slowness and accuracy. More than a year has passed since my last review, so I was expecting a polished product. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
JetBrains AI Assistant is buggy
I made sure to disable all potentially conflicting plugins, but after just a few prompts, the JetBrains AI Assistant Chat stopped working.
I rebooted and tried to troubleshoot, but this plugin ultimately errors out very often. When you pay for something, you just expect it to work, so I lost my patience very quickly.
It doesn't seem like an isolated issue, either. A quick look at the reviews on their website confirms it: JetBrains AI Assistant Reviews.
The Pricing is Unsustainable
The other significant issue is that the offering seems far more expensive than the competition.
For 10 EUR, you get 10 Credits for a month. According to their metrics, 1 Credit covers around 10 Chat requests. This means that if you worked 20 days in a month, you would only get about 5 chat requests per day! That is absolutely not sustainable.
Conclusion
As I said, I'm not here to badmouth JetBrains; I truly love their IDE. However, something is fundamentally off with their AI product. I know I didn't test it in detail, but I don't think it's my job to stick around and make it work. They need to find a way to hook me in and keep me hooked. It felt clumsy from day one, and they haven't managed to catch up with the leader of the pack, GitHub Copilot. It's a shame, because if you exclude IntelliJ aficionados, new developers are more likely to choose VS Code or Cursor just because of their superior AI integration.
My Next Step: Since I stopped my GitHub Copilot subscription, I'm going to give Gemini Code Assist a shot (which is apparently free for individual use) and report back soon.
A Final Thought on Autocomplete vs. Chat: I decided to evaluate alternatives to GitHub Copilot because I sometimes spend more time refusing suggestions than accepting them. It makes me wonder if the best way to work with AI isn't through chat and agents, rather than simple autocomplete. What’s your take?