Beyond Auto-Complete: Junie Is Your Autonomous Coding Partner in JetBrains IDEs
A hands-on look at Junie’s autonomous coding, project understanding, and customizable behavior.
In this video, Dan introduces JetBrains Junie, our new AI-powered coding agent designed to work directly within JetBrains IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and GoLand. Unlike traditional autocomplete assistants, Junie is a fully autonomous coding partner that can understand your code, implement features, and even run and assess tests while keeping the developer in control.
Demo Highlights
I like this video because it shows three clear examples of how Junie can help developers.
To start with, cast your mind back to your first day in a new job when you get your hands on the codebase for the first time. Dan shows us how Junie can explore an existing project and generate a high-level overview using Junie's Chat Mode. The insights from Junie help you to understand the structure, tech stack, and architectural decisions. This gives you fast insight without needing to trawl through the files one by one. It's much faster than reading through the code yourself and can give you a jump-start to know where to look to fix that bug or add a new feature.
Junie has a second mode called Code. Using that, Dan asks Junie to create a new REST API using the JSONPlaceholder service. Dan then talks through the plan that Junie makes and examines the commands that Junie runs and the resulting files that it generates. Being able to generate something that works and we can iterate on it is a huge benefit for developers.
Finally, Dan shows us how to add a specific file called guidelines.md that you can use to customize the files that Junie creates based on personal preferences. In this file Dan adds several technical guidelines that Junie will follow when generating code such as which version of Java to use, which libraries to use, and how to structure the code. Super helpful!
Dan's Final Thoughts
- Junie is not just a smart assistant, but a true coding companion.
- Dan emphasizes: "You are the pilot, not the passenger."
- Junie's output should be reviewed, refined, and treated as a starting point, not a final solution.
- Junie has great potential for productivity, especially for developers already working in JetBrains IDEs.
