Advice on “turnkey” coding agent workflows?
Posted by rectalrectifier@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 9 comments
So I consider myself a software engineering purist, but only to the extent that you should really understand code that you’re merging in, so I’m not against LLMs per se. I really like Jetbrains IDEs, and I’m looking to ramp up my usage of agents, mainly for tests, boilerplate, and improved contextualization of codebases. Should I just suck it up and use Cursor or are there more Jetbrains-friendly workflows? I’m seeing pretty heady setups on HackerNews — some definitely not what I would consider “easy to use”. How far are we even in the agent ecosystem? I’m hesitant to let LLMs run code because of the potential dangers, but I definitely see the potential value in closing the iterative loop.
SporksInjected@reddit
Claude code is great as long as you don’t mind your ide and your agent being separate. It’s the only non-IDE solution I know of that supports MCP.
t0rt0ff@reddit
Jetbrains Junie is amazing. It is slow, but outcomes are much more robust than Cursor&co. Junie has regex configuration for what commands she is allowed to run by herself, for others - she will ask. Depending on the tech and types of problems you are working on, proper AI setup can allow you to do much more fun stuff and less boilerplate without sacrificing quality.
failsafe-author@reddit
I use copilot plugin for JetBrains ant it’s fine. Not sure how to compare to cursor since I haven’t used it.
0x11110110@reddit
Copilot for IntelliJ has an agent mode now, but it’s still very much in an alpha state
VoiceOfReason73@reddit
Yes, Jetbrains has their Junie plugin now for this. One of the recent versions was prompting me to confirm every single code change and file open, which was a bit of a pain. It's definitely slower than e.g. Windsurf and less effective overall, but it has potential.
berndverst@reddit
I use it - and it works ok - much better as of the latest nightly plugin releases a few days ago.
nikita2206@reddit
Yup you are stuck with VSCode (Cursor or VSCode + Roo) for now if you want state of the art agentic workflows within an editor, nothing else compares at the moment. If CLI is fine then Claude Code and Aider can work for you.
worst_protagonist@reddit
JetBrains has built in AI features now. https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/
I don't use JetBrains so I dunno if they're any good or if the satisfy all the use cases you want to embrace
_hypnoCode@reddit
Claude Code I think has an official plugin for JetBrains or maybe they will be releasing one soon.
Or you can just use their CLI.