If you're the sort of software developer who relies on pair programming to onboard new team members or debug thorny problems with colleagues, JetBrains has news that might sting. The company is retiring Code With Me, its built-in pair-programming tool, after the 2026.1 IDE release. By the first quarter of 2027, the public relay infrastructure will shut down completely.
But this isn't a story about losing a feature. It's about JetBrains making a calculated bet that the future of developer tools is not collaborative editing between humans, but orchestration of AI agents across teams.
The pivot
On the same day JetBrains announced Code With Me's retirement, the company unveiled JetBrains Central, a platform designed to manage what it calls "agentic software development." Rather than individual developers delegating tasks to a single AI assistant, Central creates infrastructure for teams to run multiple autonomous agents, manage their output, track costs, and enforce governance policies.
According to JetBrains' own survey of 11,000 developers conducted in January 2026, 90% already use AI at work, 22% use AI coding agents, and 66% plan to adopt them within 12 months. Those numbers matter because they explain why JetBrains is moving resources. Code With Me isn't being killed by declining usage alone; it's being killed by opportunity cost.
Central comprises governance systems, cloud infrastructure for running agents, and shared context across repositories and projects. Early access launches in the second quarter of this year, with updated pricing for organisations to follow.
The human cost
That reallocation of engineering talent stings real people. Demand for Code With Me peaked during the pandemic and has since shifted, with many teams adopting different collaboration workflows. That's marketing-speak for "we don't see the use cases we saw in 2020." But for the teams still using it, the feature solved specific problems that general-purpose tools like Slack and Zoom don't.
Distributed teams rely on Code With Me for hands-on onboarding. Mentors use it to guide junior developers. Small shops working entirely remotely use it to collaborate in real time without copying code snippets or fighting version control systems. When JetBrains announced the retirement, the feedback was immediate and pointed: "This will be devastating for our workflow if it disappears," wrote one developer. Another noted that maintaining Code With Me alongside the evolving IntelliJ Platform requires ongoing engineering investment.
That framing contains a genuine trade-off. JetBrains isn't lying when it says maintaining Code With Me requires resources. But it's also true that those resources could have been directed toward making pair programming work better alongside AI agents, or funding a skeleton crew to keep the feature stable. The company chose neither.
The honest complexity
What makes this decision tricky is that both sides have legitimate points. JetBrains is a commercial company responding to rapid market shifts. If 90% of developers are already using AI and two-thirds plan to adopt autonomous coding agents within a year, standing pat on pair programming feels like ignoring your market. The company's business depends on being the layer that developers choose to orchestrate their work. If another vendor builds that orchestration layer first, JetBrains' traditional IDE business faces real pressure.
At the same time, moving at the pace of market adoption means abandoning developers whose workflows don't (yet) centre on AI agents. Most of AI's impact remains limited to individual productivity, with only 13% of developers reporting AI use across the entire software development lifecycle. That means most teams still rely on human collaboration for code review, testing, and architectural decisions.
Code With Me will remain available as a marketplace plugin until the first quarter of 2027, with security fixes continuing during that window. For teams still depending on it, that's roughly nine months to find alternatives.
The larger lesson is clearer: developer tools are being reorganised around AI orchestration, and vendors are betting that the economics of that reorganisation justify rationalising features that served the old model. Whether that bet pays off will depend on whether the agentic development tools JetBrains is building actually deliver the governance, cost control, and reliability that enterprises demand. If Central succeeds, Code With Me's retirement will look like a sensible reallocation of resources. If it doesn't, JetBrains will have shed a beloved tool for a platform that never landed.