JetBrains has rolled out the 2024.2 updates for its suite of integrated development environments (IDEs) and its AI assistant, bringing a host of new features aimed at enhancing developer productivity. The updates, unveiled on August 6, bring a more streamlined user interface (UI) across the JetBrains IDEs, improved code completion, and smarter functionality for the JetBrains AI Assistant, making it a powerful tool for developers working across various languages.
The standout feature in the JetBrains AI Assistant 2024.2 is its improved code completion for Java, Kotlin, and Python, powered by JetBrains’ own large language models (LLMs). Developers will experience faster, more accurate code suggestions, and JetBrains promises that support for additional languages will be added in future updates. Furthermore, the AI assistant’s chat function has also been upgraded to leverage the GPT-4o mini model, which enables more nuanced responses. The chat now includes references for better context, and developers can use new features such as in-terminal version control system (VCS) conflict resolution and customizable prompts for unit tests and documentation generation.
For the JetBrains IDEs themselves, the updates introduce a new default UI designed to reduce visual clutter and simplify access to key features. The updated UI progressively reveals complex functionality as needed, streamlining the user experience. While the new UI is the default, developers can still revert to the classic JetBrains interface through a plugin if preferred. Another notable improvement is the enhanced Search Everywhere dialog, which now allows developers to preview codebase elements before selecting them. Additionally, the IDEs now automatically detect and utilize proxy settings configured on the developer’s machine, reducing setup time.
The 2024.2 updates also bring some impressive new capabilities to individual JetBrains IDEs. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate now supports running Spring Data JPA directly within the IDE, allowing for instant verification of repository queries. PyCharm has revamped its Jupyter notebooks and introduced AI-powered cells to accelerate data analysis workflows. PhpStorm offers enhanced terminal functionality, including log file viewing and command auto-completion for popular frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and WordPress. Meanwhile, GoLand has added powerful refactoring tools and better support for the latest Go language features, alongside performance improvements and fixes for remote development environments.