First background agents in Jetbrains IDEs [video]

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First background agents in Jetbrains IDEs [video]

TLDR: made the first background coding agent that has an isolated workspace and runs locally Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains! Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex? Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender, background agents run locally in a lightweight git worktree/IDE tab. This means when the agent is done, you can easily clean up the changes and run code with a few clicks. Under the hood, the agent behaves similarly to claude code (didn’t want to reinvent the wheel), but also leverages all of the hooks into IntelliJ sdk like go-to-definition, find usages, auto-imports for accuracy, and it gives a cleaner visual UI for reviewing changes and merging them. You can use any frontier model like gpt-5/sonnet-4 as the base. We’ve had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the IntelliJ codebase to cleanly set up and manage the isolated environment, and I think you’ll appreciate the simple UX of hitting cmd+enter to run a background agent anywhere. get started docs: https://docs.firebender.com/get-started/background-agents download the plugin: https://firebender.com Would love to get your feedback to help us improve the tool for you! Thanks!