You don't _have_ to use the AI stuff, personally I've disabled all of it because my fan was spinning like crazy. Maybe in a year or two I'll try it again.
I like a good conspiracy but based on what? Jetbrains have no incentive to force that, they make money based on providing flexible tools that people will pay for. And their IDEs are desktop apps, you could always just... not upgrade. Unlike web or cloud-based "IDEs".
I was already a satisfied paying customer. I don't need that new stuff but I understand they have to go where the market goes if they want to stay relevant vs competitors (Microsoft VSCode/Github/Copilot) in the eyes of prospective customers who judge products using comparative feature grids.
If you don't want to use an IDE or pay for your tools that's fine. You don't have to look for reasons to hate on it. No one cares what you don't use.
> I don't need that new stuff but I understand they have to go where the market goes if they want to stay relevant vs competitors
Looking at the people racing to jump off the cliff and saying "let's maybe consider not doing that" can be an competitive advantage, see https://procreate.com/ai
Thanks for the reminder! I was looking for a modern editor without AI stuff (I do like AI things but sometimes you'd want an off.) Didn't notice it became open source. Nice!
It's automatically installed and bundled with the IDE. You can disable it, but to uninstall fully you have to manually delete files from each and every IDE installation
As mentioned in another comment, you can add a .noai file to the root of your project to disable AI support.
As to deleting files that ship with the app but that aren't used if you disable them... that feels awfully 1980's "gosh disk space is expensive" thinking.
I was curious about Z̶i̶g̶ Zed, until they too started adding AI garbage. Sad.
Luckily, I can be fairly confident that my trusty neovim will never add AI garbage unless I specifically go out of my way to install plug-ins.
EDIT: Zed, not Zig