JetBrains Opens Early Access for Air Inside Its IDEs, Bringing Parallel Agent Sessions to the Editor Without Bundling an Agent
JetBrains has opened an early access program for Air in its IDEs, available as a Marketplace plugin or in 2026.3 EAP builds, and designed to run agents users already have.
Overview
JetBrains has launched an early access program for Air inside its IDEs. According to the JetBrains Blog, the program is available as a plugin on JetBrains Marketplace or natively in the 2026.3 EAP builds of JetBrains IDEs. SD Times carried the announcement in its October 1, 2026 news roundup, describing Air as an open system of products for agentic development.
The move continues a shift JetBrains has been making since Air first appeared. As previously reported, Air entered public preview in March as a standalone agentic environment.
What We Know
Bring your own agent
The JetBrains Blog says the Air plugin “is a conduit for agents and subscriptions you already use. It is not an AI provider, and it ships with no agents installed.” Per both JetBrains and SD Times, Air works with agents such as Codex, GitHub Copilot, Junie, Cursor, and other ACP-compatible agents. JetBrains adds that it detects agents already installed on a machine, that users can also use a Claude subscription in Air’s terminal and full-screen tab, and that a JetBrains AI subscription is not required to use existing agents with Air.
For people without an agent subscription, JetBrains says users can try Air with free Junie Lite runs, which it describes as its efficient coding agent for everyday tasks.
Sessions instead of chat
JetBrains argues in the announcement that orchestrating several tasks concurrently is fundamentally different from having a conversation with AI, and that this is why Air is a separate experience rather than more agents added to AI chat. According to the JetBrains Blog, Air organizes agent work into sessions that can be viewed across projects in one place, with activity, unread updates, changed files, and outgoing commits visible at a glance, and with the cost of each session shown as the user works.
Other features listed by JetBrains:
- Double-tapping Ctrl from anywhere in the IDE opens a prompt window to start a new agent session with the current context attached.
- Sessions open in the editor as tabs; users can keep a terminal UI or choose a graphical chat.
- Sessions can start from any branch, on a new branch or detached, using temporary worktrees, with results cherry-picked back into the main project.
- Agents can run in the cloud for long-running or background tasks. JetBrains says this is currently available to orgs with AI seats.
JetBrains says built-in IDE skills and tools give supported agents access to workflows for tasks like debugging, performance profiling, database exploration, and semantic code search, which it says can help agents produce better results and, for some tasks, use fewer tokens. SD Times reproduces the same description of the built-in IDE skills and tools.
Data and opt-out
On privacy, JetBrains states that with no agents, nothing leaves the machine, and that with a third-party subscription data goes to that provider rather than to JetBrains. It also says Air adds no new data processing terms and that disabling the Air plugin changes nothing else.
Context: Air Teams
The IDE launch follows Air Teams. In a September post, JetBrains introduced Air Teams as the team layer for agentic development, available to business customers, and said it is expanding Air beyond a standalone desktop app into a system that supports individual developers, teams, and organizations. The post says Air Teams comes with 10 Automation templates, including code review, bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and documentation maintenance.
What We Don’t Know
- The announcement does not give a general-availability date, and the plugin is an early access release.
- JetBrains does not state pricing for cloud execution beyond saying it is currently available to orgs with AI seats.
- Neither source cites independent testing of the claim that IDE tools can reduce token use for some tasks.
Analysis
JetBrains says it expects Air to become the primary experience for agentic workflows in its IDEs over time, while AI Assistant remains available for now, according to the JetBrains Blog. The same post argues that an IDE that keeps agents at arm’s length will struggle to stay relevant. Positioning Air as a tool window with no bundled agent lets JetBrains compete on the IDE layer, meaning review, diffs, inspections, and profiling, while leaving model choice to the user.