YunaJetBrains builds brilliant tools. No question. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. The IDE that once felt like a sleek exosuit now wears more like a lead apron. Familiar, powerful but exhausting.
Remember Eclipse? I do. Grew up with it. Then grew out of it, death by poor developer experience. I see echoes of that fate in JetBrains, and it terrifies me. Not because JetBrains is bad. But because it was once… fun.
I've seen more memory leaks, heavier startup times, and codebases that feel like they took a wrong turn into a garbage collector. A "Hello World" project now needs 5GB If I leave it open long enough. It starts asking me existential questions.
My IDE now eats up 15GB with simple projects. Caches? Massive. Often useless. Builds that run clean in terminal break in IntelliJ until I do the sacred dance: Build → Rebuild Project or Invalidate Caches. It's a modern ritual. I now default to my terminal. It's honest. It listens. It doesn't pretend.
Plugin development? A labyrinth. Testing plugins is like chasing asynchronous shadows. Documentation is scarce, SDKs mutate overnight, and the event system reminds me of a toddler with espresso. Thousands of change events for a single file edit. I wanted to build useful tools.
Even giants like AWS and CodePilot plugins throw random exceptions. Testing? What's that? The SDK laughs in JUnit.
The final twist: my own plugin, full of hope and effort, is now the ugliest code I've ever written. I can't fix it. I barely recognize it. I miss simplicity. I miss reliability. I miss fun.
JetBrains still has brilliance. But quality? It's slipping. The warning signs are glowing. Not with malice, but with entropy.
Would be poetic if a new IDE emerged soon. Just like JetBrains once did, fresh, small, efficient. Until then, I'll keep fighting caches, memory bloat, and undetectable test classes… while whispering my Eclipse shortcuts in IntelliJ like ancient spells.
Funny, isn't it? Software today feels less like writing code and more like running a game engine. But the bugs aren't part of the plot. They're just bugs.
#JetBrains #IntelliJ #PluginDevelopment #Java #DeveloperExperience #IDEThoughts #Kotlin #MemoryLeaks #BringBackFun #TerminalNeverLies
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