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JetBrains Air pulls coding agents out of AI chat and into parallel editor sessions
JetBrains opened early access to Air, a plugin and 2026.3 EAP feature that runs a developer's existing coding agents as parallel sessions inside its IDEs. Air needs no JetBrains AI subscription, so a team can trial multi-agent work on the agent plans it already pays for.
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What happened
- Air detects coding agents already installed on a developer's machine and brings them directly into the IDE.
- Sessions from every project appear in one view showing activity, unread updates, changed files, outgoing commits and what each session has cost so far.
- Double-tapping Ctrl anywhere in the IDE opens a prompt that starts a new agent session with the current context already attached.
- According to JetBrains, Air can run agent sessions either on the local machine or in the cloud.
- JetBrains is offering free runs of Junie Lite, its own coding agent for everyday tasks, to developers trying Air.
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Why it matters
- decision A team can trial several vendors' agents on its own repository inside one IDE before it standardises on any of them.
- cost Concurrent sessions multiply spend on the provider plans a team already pays for, and the developer steering them is the first person positioned to stop an expensive one.
- constraint Because the IDE tooling goes only to supported agents, two agents running side by side in Air can get different access to the debugger, profiler and code search.
JetBrains wrote that it first tried to fit agentic work into AI Assistant by adding more agents to the existing chat, then changed course as the workflows evolved [9]. The company wrote: "Orchestrating several tasks concurrently is fundamentally different from having a conversation with AI." [10] I think that diagnosis is correct. A chat panel keeps one conversation in view, and steering several agents needs the state of every task on screen at once.
The post also says "an IDE that keeps agents at arm's length will struggle to stay relevant" [11]. An IDE vendor was always going to reach that conclusion. The argument underneath it is more specific: "As agents do more of the work, verifying and owning the result becomes the hard part, and that is what the IDE is for." [18]
Air itself is a routing layer. JetBrains describes the plugin as "a conduit for agents and subscriptions you already use" and adds: "It is not an AI provider, and it ships with no agents installed." [4] The supported list is Codex, GitHub Copilot, Junie, Cursor and "other ACP-compatible agents" [6]. The last entry is a protocol, so the list is open to any agent that implements ACP [6].
Claude is listed separately. The post scopes a Claude subscription to Air's terminal and full-screen tab [7]. Sessions in general can open as editor tabs, in a terminal UI, or as a graphical chat [16].
Supported agents get built-in IDE skills and tools for debugging, performance profiling, database exploration and semantic code search [12]. JetBrains says this "can help agents produce better results and, for some tasks, use fewer tokens." [13] The post does not include a token figure or name the tasks. For a saving to transfer to a given repository, the agent would have to be on the supported list. The task would also have to be one where a semantic search or a debugger call replaces reading whole files into the agent's context.
For a team that already reviews code in a JetBrains IDE, the editor-tab design is the right call. Opening a session as a tab gives agent work "a real screen space alongside your code" [16]. Review of that work then runs through the diffs, navigation and inspections the IDE already provides [19].
What to watch
- Whether JetBrains publishes token or quality measurements for the IDE skills, and which agents it counts as supported.
- Whether Claude subscriptions gain the graphical chat and editor-tab surfaces listed for other sessions.
- When Air leaves the EAP and ships in a stable 2026.3 release, and what happens to agents in AI Assistant's chat.