JetBrains has revealed plans to scrap its Fleet IDE (integrated development environment) platform amid a sharpened focus on its flagship IntelliJ offering.
In a blog post last week, the company said running two general-purpose IDE platforms “diluted our focus” and a review prompted the decision.
The move means that from 22 December, Fleet will no longer be available for download. JetBrains added that it’s now building a new product “focused on agentic development”.
“Fleet did not succeed as a standalone product. We could neither replace IntelliJ IDEA with Fleet nor narrow it into a clear, differentiated niche,” the company said.
“We suddenly had two IDE families aimed at largely the same audience, with overlapping purposes. Users kept asking which one to choose, and the answer was never short or satisfying. Two similar products created friction and raised questions about ownership and long-term investment.”
Crucially, no more updates will be released for the IDE platform. The company said customers can continue using the platform, however, some features that rely on server-side services, such as its AI assistant, “may stop working over time”.
JetBrains says Fleet wasn't a failure
JetBrains said the decision to scrap Fleet doesn’t mean it was a failure. First launched in 2021, it was designed to offer users a lightweight multi-language IDE, later operating as an editor and coding assistant.
Indeed, the company noted that it “seriously considered” whether Fleet could act as a second flagship IDE in addition to IntelliJ-based tools.
A host of Fleet components now power JetBrains IDEs, the company said, while several UX and UI concepts built through the platform have been adopted across other products.
Ultimately, having two overlapping products proved detrimental and “created confusion” for customers.
“User feedback was consistent: If you already work with IntelliJ IDEA, Rider, WebStorm, PyCharm, or any other JetBrains IDE, switching to Fleet required a strong reason – and Fleet did not offer enough value to justify the transition from IDEs you already know and love,” the company said.
JetBrains' agentic focus
Learnings from the Fleet experience will power a new “niche” focus at the company, JetBrains revealed.
The company is building a new “agentic development environment” based on the Fleet platform. This will eventually ship as a new product with a new name and help streamline agentic workflows for developers.
According to JetBrains, working on AI features with Fleet showed a “new development workflow began to take shape”, prompting a major rethink on IDEs and evolving developer processes.
“Developers started delegating meaningful tasks to agents – updating tests, cleaning code, refactoring modules, exploring unfamiliar code paths, and even building new features,” the company explained.
“These tasks run asynchronously and return full patches. The developer doesn’t write the code themselves. They guide the agent and review its output. This is fundamentally different from the classic IDE workflow, which is based on immediate feedback, synchronous control, and a single stable local state.”
By contrast, agentic workflows rely on “structured task definition, context assembly, multiple asynchronous runs, isolated execution, and review-first workflows”.
With this in mind, combining them into a single tool resulted in a disjointed and confusing experience.
“The Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows.”
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