JetBrains opened the early access program for Air in its IDEs, for running third-party agents

Archive entry: this covers an event from October 1, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On October 1, 2026, JetBrains opened the Early Access Program (EAP) for Air in JetBrains IDEs, in a JetBrains AI blog post by Dominique Rolink on the Air in IDEs EAP. The EAP was available as a plugin on JetBrains Marketplace or natively in the 2026.3 EAP builds of JetBrains IDEs, and Air could be tried with free Junie Lite runs.

What the Air EAP offered

• The Air plugin was not an AI provider and shipped with no agents installed. It detected agents already on the machine.
• It worked with Codex, GitHub Copilot, Junie, Cursor and other ACP-compatible agents, and a Claude subscription could be used in Air's terminal and full-screen tab. A JetBrains AI subscription was not required.
• Double-tapping Ctrl opened a prompt window that started an agent session with the working context attached.
• Agents could run locally or in the cloud, and cloud runs were available to organizations with AI seats at launch.
• Sessions could run in temporary worktrees, with results cherry-picked back into the main project.

What it meant for people who build with AI

JetBrains IDE users could run the agents and subscriptions they already paid for inside IntelliJ-based IDEs. With a third-party subscription, data went directly to that provider and did not pass through JetBrains.

Air and AI Assistant

AI Assistant remained available, and JetBrains said it expected Air to become the primary experience for agentic workflows in its IDEs.

Sources

• A New Agentic Experience: JetBrains Air in IDEs - EAP Now Open (JetBrains, October 1, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.