Can JetBrains close the IDE skills gap before AI widens it further?

JetBrains recently launched a program to bring hands-on coding practice into its professional development environments, targeting the gap between how programming is taught online and how it’s practiced in the industry.

The JetBrains Course Creators Program, announced last month, lets independent educators on platforms like Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Pluralsight embed practical exercises directly into JetBrains IDEs via the JetBrains Academy plugin. The pitch is that students shouldn’t just watch videos and take quizzes — they should write, run, and debug code in the same tools they’ll encounter on the job.

“Online programming education still has a major gap: students learn concepts through videos and browser-based exercises but rarely get to code in the professional tools they’ll use in development jobs,” writes Regina Muradova, product marketing manager at JetBrains, in a blog post.

JetBrains’ argument is that AI-generated code raises the stakes for foundational developer skills — that as AI writes more code, the ability to debug, navigate projects, and validate outputs in a real IDE becomes more important, not less.

“As AI generates more code, developers need stronger hands-on experience in debugging, navigating projects and working in professional IDEs to validate and refine outputs.”

“As AI generates more code, developers need stronger hands-on experience in debugging, navigating projects, and working in professional IDEs to validate and refine outputs,” Muradova says.

A claim that doesn’t hold

JetBrains’ pitch materials cite that “the creators of Claude Code” have acknowledged that AI coding tools actively hinder junior developer skill acquisition.

Yet, “We don’t base this initiative on any specific statement from any of the frontier providers,” Muradova tells The New Stack. “More broadly, there is an ongoing industry discussion about balancing AI-assisted development with foundational skill-building.”

Asked whether the theory-to-practice gap is grounded in user research or market positioning, Muradova notes that “This observation comes primarily from our experience working in programming education through JetBrains Academy and conversations with educators.”

Coursera integration arrives

The program’s most concrete technical element is Coursera integration. JetBrains introduced support for Coursera’s Apps Learning Tools Interoperability framework, enabling educators to embed coding exercises in their courses and allowing learners to open projects in a JetBrains IDE with a single click, while progress is automatically synced.

“Coursera integration is actually a recent development,” Muradova confirms.

For other platforms, course creators work with JetBrains to migrate the practical portion of their courses into the IDE using the JetBrains Academy plugin. The company says most integrations take two to four weeks. Educators who aren’t ready for full integration can also point students to free JetBrains IDEs for non-commercial use, obtain educational license coupons, or co-market with JetBrains if they already feature its tools in course materials.

The program is in its early stages. JetBrains says two creators have completed IDE integration and three more are actively working on courses. The company declined to specify how many additional educators it is in discussions with.

The AI contradiction

JetBrains sells its own AI coding tools, including JetBrains AI Assistant and Junie, its CLI coding agent. That creates a bit of tension. The company is simultaneously pushing AI-assisted development and arguing that students need more unassisted hands-on practice to develop real skills.

“We don’t see those goals as contradictory. AI tools can be valuable learning aids, but learners still need to understand how software is built…”

Asked how it reconciles those positions, Muradova says: “We don’t see those goals as contradictory. AI tools can be valuable learning aids, but learners still need to understand how software is built, debug issues, and work within professional development environments.”

For now, AI Assistant and Junie are not baked into the Course Creators Program.

“Individual educators can decide how they want to incorporate AI tools into their teaching, but AI Assistant and Junie are not a required part of the program,” Muradova says.

Measuring success

JetBrains defines near-term success in terms of adoption: creator participation, learner engagement with IDE-based exercises, and course count. No outcome-based metrics — employer feedback, hiring data, skill assessments — are part of the current framework. Asked whether employers or hiring managers shaped the definition of “real-world skills” used in the program, Muradova says the initiative is “currently informed primarily by our experience building developer tools and educational products.”

The company also pushed back on comparisons to GitHub Copilot and Microsoft’s education-facing AI tools.

“This program is not an AI tutoring product,” Muradova says. “It’s about helping educators bring hands-on learning into professional development environments by integrating practical exercises directly into JetBrains IDEs.”

Whether a partnership program with five active creators is a meaningful counter to Microsoft’s reach in developer education remains to be seen. But JetBrains’ underlying argument, that professional IDE fluency is a skill worth teaching and not assuming students will pick it up on their own, is defensible. However, the execution is nascent.

At first glance, based on JetBrains’ initial pitch, this seemed like it might be similar to “Clippy”, Microsoft’s old digital assistant.

However, Muravado says, “No. The program isn’t an assistant or in-product guide. It’s a partnership program that helps educators integrate coding exercises into JetBrains IDEs and deliver a more hands-on learning experience.”