JetBrains AI Assistant

JetBrains AI Assistant is the AI layer inside the IDEs that a very large share of European backend and enterprise development already runs on. That is its central advantage over Cursor: there is no editor migration, no re-learning of keybindings and no second tool to license. The assistant appears inside IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, Rider, WebStorm and the rest of the family, using the IDE's existing index of your project as context.

JetBrains is a Czech company, founded in Prague in 2000 and still headquartered there, which puts the vendor relationship under EU law rather than under a US processor agreement.

Completion, Chat and the Junie Agent

The assistant works at three levels. Inline completion suggests the next lines as you type, informed by the IDE's static analysis rather than by text prediction alone — which is why its suggestions tend to respect your actual types and imports. In-IDE chat answers questions about the open project and can apply changes directly to files. Junie, the agentic mode, takes a task description and works through multiple files, running tests and iterating until it has a working change you can review as a diff.

Because the assistant sits on top of the IDE's own understanding of the codebase, it handles refactoring-heavy work — renaming across modules, extracting interfaces, adjusting call sites — better than assistants that treat source as plain text.

Where Your Code Goes

For paid business plans, JetBrains contractually excludes customer code and prompts from model training, and offers EU data residency for processing. That is the answer most European procurement teams need before an AI assistant can be approved for a proprietary codebase.

The stronger option is local models: the assistant can be pointed at a model running through LM Studio or Ollama on the developer's own machine, in which case no source leaves the laptop at all. Quality drops compared to frontier models, but for completion and boilerplate the gap is considerably smaller than for complex reasoning.

Licensing and Cost

AI Pro is bundled into the All Products Pack, so organisations already paying for JetBrains licences often find the assistant costs them nothing additional. Compared with buying Cursor seats alongside existing IDE licences, that is a meaningful saving at team scale.

Limitations to Consider

The assistant only exists inside JetBrains IDEs. If your team works in VS Code, Neovim or Xcode, this is not an option and Continue pointed at a European model is the closer fit. The agentic Junie mode is also less mature than the equivalents in Cursor and Claude Code, and the underlying frontier models are not European — JetBrains routes to third-party providers unless you configure a local model.

Who Should Use JetBrains AI Assistant

Teams that already live in JetBrains IDEs and want AI assistance without adding a US vendor, a second editor or a second licence line. It is the lowest-friction European option in the category, and the local-model path makes it viable even where source code cannot leave the building.