Air is an "open system" for agentic development, in early access from 1 October through the 2026.3 EAP builds or as a Marketplace plugin. You run several agents in parallel, locally or in the cloud, each in its own temporary worktree. A JetBrains AI subscription is not mandatory: Junie Lite is free after signing in, and you bring your own Codex, Gemini, GitHub Copilot or Claude Agent.
- Double-tap Ctrl opens a prompt window with the current context already attached. All sessions are visible in one place, across projects; each opens in the editor, the terminal or a chat.
- Local or cloud: for long tasks the agent runs in the cloud and you can close your machine. Cloud runs require a JetBrains AI subscription.
- "No agents? Nothing leaves your machine": with no agent connected, nothing is sent out. AI Assistant stays on as a separate plugin.
Ctrl twice, the task is off, you keep typing. That is the whole gesture. With it JetBrains separates orchestration from the conversation with the model, and they say so outright: running several tasks at once is not a chat.
Here is what gets overlooked: JetBrains is not selling a model here. It is selling the place where the models work. Microsoft's Copilot, Anthropic's agent and OpenAI's sit side by side in the same window, and the editor is the referee between them.
It is a host's move, and a smart one. Whoever holds the debugger, the project history and the terminal holds the context. The model comes and goes with your subscription. The editor stays.
The trap is in the worktrees. Five agents in five parallel copies of the code means five merges at the end of the day, and you are the one doing the merging. JetBrains does not promise to solve that, which is honest.
Early access is early access. If you try it, try it on a branch you can throw away. The verdict comes after the first real sprint with two agents. The demo does not count.