JetBrains shifts to agentic dev with Central, retires pair programming

Summary

Dev tooling biz JetBrains has previewed Central for agentic AI software development but will retire the Code With Me human pair programming feature. Head of agentic platform Oleg Koverznev said Central is a system for agentic software development comprising governance, cloud infrastructure for running agents, and shared context across repositories and projects. Some parts of Central were already in preview, including the Air IDE and the JetBrains Console, which provides token management and usage analytics for teams using AI. JetBrains Central promises to manage AI agents for development teams Central will be available for early access in the second quarter of this year. Koverznev also said updated pricing for organizations is coming soon, perhaps indicating a premium for users of the new system. According to Koverznev, "code generation is cheap and no longer a bottleneck." The challenge now, he said, is managing the "growing operational and economic complexity of agent-driven work." A JetBrains survey of 11,000 developers showed that 90 percent already use AI, 22 percent already use AI coding agents, and 66 percent plan to adopt agents within 12 months. The AI wave puts the company in a tough spot, with its traditional IDE business under threat, and new competition from many providers, large and small, offering to help orchestrate agents. Its challenge is to keep up with AI without alienating its core customers - developers using its wide and generally well-liked range of IDEs for programming languages including Java, Python, C#, and Rust. JetBrains risks doing so by abandoning Code With Me collaborative coding in its IDEs. This feature enables a project to be shared with another remote developer for working on code together or debugging with colleagues. "2026.1 will be the last IDE to officially support Code With Me," said marketing lead Ekaterina Ryabukha. The feature will be removed from the IDE but offered as a separate plugin until the first quarter of 2027, w...