JetBrains shifts to agentic dev with Central, retires pair programming
JetBrains Kills Code With Me, Bets Everything on Agent Infrastructure
The company that built IDEs for humans is pivoting hard to manage the AI agents doing the work instead.
JetBrains this week unveiled JetBrains Central — an open orchestration layer for agentic software development. The platform, entering early access in Q2 2026, handles governance, cloud runtimes, and semantic context across repositories for AI coding agents. It supports Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, and custom-built agents. No lock-in.
The company is also retiring Code With Me — its real-time collaborative coding feature — by Q1 2027. The 2026.1 IDE release will be the last to officially support it. "Code generation is cheap and no longer a bottleneck," JetBrains Central head Oleg Koverznev said in the announcement. "The real challenge is managing the growing operational and economic complexity of agent-driven work."
That framing is worth sitting with. JetBrains spent years building tools for humans to write code together. Now its thesis is that the hard part isn't writing code — it's everything around it: cost attribution, policy enforcement, task routing, shared context across a codebase, and keeping agent output aligned with what you actually wanted. Central is an attempt to own that layer.
The numbers behind the pivot
JetBrains surveyed 11,000 developers worldwide in January 2026. Ninety percent already use AI at work. Twenty-two percent already use AI coding agents. Sixty-six percent of companies surveyed plan to adopt agents within the next twelve months.
Those are aggressive adoption figures — but the more interesting data point is buried: only 13 percent of developers report using AI across the entire software development lifecycle, from code review through release pipelines. AI use is concentrated at the desk, not across the stack. The gap between individual productivity gains and measurable improvements in delivery speed or cost efficiency is where Central is aimed.
"The importance of a tool is determined not by how often it's used, but by the scale and difficulty of the problems it solves," wrote one developer on the Code With Me sunset post, responding to the news that a two-person remote company using pair programming full-time would lose the feature.
What Central actually does
Central has three functional layers. The first is governance — policy enforcement, identity and access management, observability, auditability, and cost attribution for agent work. Some of this is already live in the JetBrains Central Console. The second is agent execution infrastructure — cloud runtimes that let agents operate reliably across development environments without the developer managing the underlying compute. The third is agent optimization and context: a semantic layer that aggregates information from code, architecture, runtime behavior, and organizational knowledge, then routes tasks to the most appropriate model or tool.
The semantic routing piece is the most interesting claim. JetBrains is saying it will build a persistent, cross-repo understanding of a codebase — what the architecture looks like, where things live, what they depend on — and use that to give agents better context than a prompt can provide. If this works at scale, it solves one of the persistent failure modes of coding agents: they don't know your codebase, only what you can fit in a context window. JetBrains is betting that infrastructure here pays off.
JetBrains SVP of Operations Hadi Hariri said the company is piloting Central internally. "We are increasingly leaning into agents and AI-driven workflows, which is creating a need for better visibility into costs and governance."
Code With Me: what JetBrains won't say out loud
The company frames the Code With Me sunset as a response to declining demand post-pandemic. That may be true. But the deeper story is that JetBrains is redirecting engineering investment away from human collaboration and toward agent orchestration — and the economics of agentic development are simply more interesting to them right now.
The feature will work as a standalone plugin until Q1 2027, when public relay infrastructure gets turned off. Enterprise customers with existing contracts are covered through the end of the transition period.
What this means for the ecosystem
JetBrains isn't the only company building agent infrastructure — GitHub, Sourcegraph, and a growing roster of startups are all competing for the orchestration layer. What JetBrains has that others don't is a native relationship with the IDE: if Central works, it becomes the substrate that sits between the developer and the agent in a way that's difficult to replicate from outside the platform.
The open architecture is notable. JetBrains is explicitly not building its own agent and not forcing a specific stack. This is a governance and infrastructure play, not a model play. Whether that restraint is strategic or a gap in the product will become clearer when the EAP lands.
Early access for design partners opens in Q2 2026. Organizations can apply at lp.jetbrains.com/central-design-partners.
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