JetBrains has defended its removal of negative reviews and feedback for its AI Assistant on its plugin marketplace, stating that this was either in accordance with its policy or to remove outdated content.

The AI Assistant, first released in July 2023, has been downloaded over 22 million times but is rated only 2.3 out of 5. Users this week noticed that some negative reviews were being removed. “My previous comment was deleted without any specific reason. Jetbrains seems to be deleting negative reviews, which destroyed my confidence and trust in this company. They do not value their customers and their feedback anymore. I still give it 1 star, because it installed automatically and is slow and buggy,” said one today. 

Reaction on social media was to see this as a desperate attempt to improve ratings; but a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved, or because they violated policy such as “swearing, etc.”

The spokesperson added that the company could have done better and said that “Nuking several reviews at once without a heads-up looked shady. At least, we should’ve posted a notice and provided more details to the authors.”

The incident has drawn attention though to the AI Assistant’s poor reputation. One developer restated their deleted post perhaps in more moderate terms, but said that issues include limited support for third-party model providers, which “is restricted to chat operations only,” noticeable latency, frequent delays, core features locked to JetBrains cloud services, inconsistent user experience across project types, and sparse documentation.

Another common complaint is that the AI Assistant installs itself without permission. A user on Reddit called it “the annoying self-healing/reinstalling phoenix of a plug-in.”

JetBrains referred us to the Reddit post linked above when we asked for comment on the deleted reviews.

AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month, as well as a new AI agent called Junie, intended to run alongside AI Assistant. Junie has been better received that the older AI plugin, though cost is an issue. “Junie is a great tool, but it’s far too expensive. With the current AI Pro plan, my token quota was used up in just three days,” said one user. 

Unlike competitors such as Microsoft, AWS or Google, JetBrains markets only developer tools and services, and does not have a separate cloud business to fall back on. Products such as the free Visual Studio Code (VS Code) have put pressure on JetBrains to be more generous with community editions of its products, but its business model depends on paying subscribers.

JetBrains IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA for Java and Rider for C# are well liked, though its gradual introduction of a new UI continues to be contentious.