JetBrains, the company renowned for developing IntelliJ IDE and the Kotlin language, has recently launched its first AI coding assistant, Junie. This new tool is designed to help developers handle everyday development tasks and can understand the context of existing projects, providing support for the creation of new applications and feature enhancements.
In the highly regarded SWE-Bench Verified benchmark, Junie successfully solved 53.6% of 500 common developer tasks. Although this score is not the highest currently (the best models exceed 60%), JetBrains believes Junie's performance is "promising." Notably, the leading model from Weights & Biases, "Programmer O1crosscheck5," has achieved a score of 64.6%.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, image licensed by Midjourney
Junie's unique advantage lies in its deep integration with JetBrains IDE. JetBrains emphasizes that even when Junie assists developers in their work, human developers remain in control. This tool not only speeds up development but also helps improve code quality. By combining the powerful features of JetBrains IDE with large language models (LLM), Junie can generate code, run checks, write tests, and validate their effectiveness.
JetBrains stated in the announcement: "AI-generated code may have flaws just like code written by developers. Ultimately, Junie will not only accelerate development speed but also raise the standards of code quality."
Junie is currently available only through an early access program after signing up for a waitlist and supports IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and PyCharm Professional IDE on Linux and Mac systems, with support for WebStorm coming soon.
The launch of this AI coding assistant marks another significant step for JetBrains in the field of AI-assisted development. Junie's deep integration and emphasis on human developer control may help it stand out in the competitive market of AI coding assistants.
