I've tried ThinkRail now.
I am a paying user of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, but lately I've been using mostly Claude Code Desktop App.
This is a cool product. Clearly, they made the agent chat pane the primary feature, while things like the Project Files and the editor itself is secondary (you are not even allowed to change files manually!).
The chat is very well done (I think it's just Pi?). People are saying how they use the IDE mostly for reviewing code, and ThinkRail makes that a primary feature as well: every change the agent makes gives you a "Review Turn" button that lets you look at exactly what was done. And the diff viewer is very good (not the same as IntelliJ, seems more like the VS Code viewer?).
It stores everything the agent does as a "Turn" so you can review every change at any time, like a git history. It also has the git log similar to IntelliJ, so you can still click on each commit in the history as well. In fact, the two things seem very similar, since each "Turn" normally results on a commit as well. It's stil unclear to me how "Turn"s are useful beyond the commit history.
It also has a fully functional terminal so you can try out things easily without leaving the tool.
JetBrains seems to have figured out how people are using their tools nowadays, and decided to go all in with this "Innovation Lab" tool.
I would still expect to be allowed to edit code/text myself in it, and maybe navigate around like in IntelliJ, but I guess I'm in the minority :P and most people just need something like this?! It's definitely much lighter than IntelliJ (it shows way down in my process list by memory, with around 140MB after quite a bit of usage, and it's highly responsive), so perhaps that's the main advantage, and bringing code navigation/editing/highlighting for all languages (it highlights the most common ones, but not LISP for example) would just result in a heavy tool again.
Its way of working with git worktrees exclusively is something I was already doing in the Claude Code App, so I think they got this right. However, CC App can also use a SSH remote connection (like TRAMP in emacs) to a devcontainer, and I've been using that a lot, so would be nice to have that option as well.
In conclusion: I like it and I think they may be going the right way with how things are going: the "IDE" becomes primarily a means to interact with agents. But at least for me, it's a bit too early to leave the full IDE completely, and I guess they could've made this just a "mode" inside IntelliJ without losing anything except for being very lightweight, and perhaps that's what they're going to do eventually?
I am a paying user of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, but lately I've been using mostly Claude Code Desktop App.
This is a cool product. Clearly, they made the agent chat pane the primary feature, while things like the Project Files and the editor itself is secondary (you are not even allowed to change files manually!).
The chat is very well done (I think it's just Pi?). People are saying how they use the IDE mostly for reviewing code, and ThinkRail makes that a primary feature as well: every change the agent makes gives you a "Review Turn" button that lets you look at exactly what was done. And the diff viewer is very good (not the same as IntelliJ, seems more like the VS Code viewer?).
It stores everything the agent does as a "Turn" so you can review every change at any time, like a git history. It also has the git log similar to IntelliJ, so you can still click on each commit in the history as well. In fact, the two things seem very similar, since each "Turn" normally results on a commit as well. It's stil unclear to me how "Turn"s are useful beyond the commit history.
It also has a fully functional terminal so you can try out things easily without leaving the tool.
JetBrains seems to have figured out how people are using their tools nowadays, and decided to go all in with this "Innovation Lab" tool.
I would still expect to be allowed to edit code/text myself in it, and maybe navigate around like in IntelliJ, but I guess I'm in the minority :P and most people just need something like this?! It's definitely much lighter than IntelliJ (it shows way down in my process list by memory, with around 140MB after quite a bit of usage, and it's highly responsive), so perhaps that's the main advantage, and bringing code navigation/editing/highlighting for all languages (it highlights the most common ones, but not LISP for example) would just result in a heavy tool again.
Its way of working with git worktrees exclusively is something I was already doing in the Claude Code App, so I think they got this right. However, CC App can also use a SSH remote connection (like TRAMP in emacs) to a devcontainer, and I've been using that a lot, so would be nice to have that option as well.
In conclusion: I like it and I think they may be going the right way with how things are going: the "IDE" becomes primarily a means to interact with agents. But at least for me, it's a bit too early to leave the full IDE completely, and I guess they could've made this just a "mode" inside IntelliJ without losing anything except for being very lightweight, and perhaps that's what they're going to do eventually?