JetBrains launched Air, a three-part system for running agents inside its IDEs, coordinating teams and governing costs across an organization

A shop already paying for JetBrains IDEs has been watching its developers install Cursor or run Claude Code in a terminal because the agentic work sat outside the IDE. JetBrains published a blog post on 2026-09-22 that answers this with Air, a set of three products for agentic software development that keeps the agent in the same window as the code. The company frames the release as one of the most significant steps in its 26-year history.

JetBrains describes Air as "an open, coherent system of products for developers, teams, and organizations, inside and beyond JetBrains IDEs." The three products, per the launch blog post: Air in JetBrains IDEs, Air Teams, and Air Governance, which is the new name for what was called JetBrains Central.

What the three products do

Air in JetBrains IDEs lets a developer direct an agent from within IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm or another JetBrains IDE, and verify what the agent produced against the code intelligence the IDE already runs. Air Teams coordinates workflows that mix people and autonomous agents on one project, so a merge, a review or a handoff between two workers can involve either. Air Governance provides organizational policy, visibility, audit trails and cost management for AI-assisted work, so a finance team can see what a hundred agent seats spent last week and stop one that is running away.

The company says its own coding agent, Junie, "will be supported across all Air surfaces" as the unified agent in the Air ecosystem. JetBrains has not published dated pricing, but the release covers "products that are available today alongside others that will be introduced as the system develops" through what the blog calls a rolling series of releases.

The multi-vendor bet

The most consequential design choice is the Agent Client Protocol. JetBrains says Air supports ACP and that the system will run "a growing range of compatible agents" beyond its own. In practice this means a team on IntelliJ can point Air at a third-party agent that speaks ACP and drive that agent from the same panel it uses for Junie, with the same governance and cost accounting. JetBrains' incentive to keep this open is real: developers already run agents from many vendors, and a Junie-only Air would lose those developers to the terminal.

The alternative story a team should consider is that a rival tool, Cursor and Claude Code being the loud examples, is already good enough. Air's argument is that the IDE keeps mattering, because the code intelligence, the refactoring, the tests and the review still have to happen against a live project. Whether that argument holds depends on whether the ACP integrations arrive quickly and whether Air Governance actually removes the finance pain that gets a Cursor rollout paused at the security review.

For a team already inside a JetBrains IDE, the practical move this week is small: read the launch post, check whether the Junie plan matches what the team is doing, and note that Air Governance now carries the JetBrains Central controls a Central pilot may already have started. For a team on another IDE, this is one more entrant in the agent coordination market, and the ACP posture is the piece worth watching.

Source

• JetBrains: Introducing JetBrains Air on the JetBrains blog