If that's so, then why is Codex such an inferior product to Claude Code? And why haven't they already built an code editor or at least VS Code extension yet?
JetBrains has been making IDE for a decade. They were the only company that actually made money by selling IDE. So I assume they have the best programmers who understand IDE.
However they fail to make a Cursor competitor so far. This alone suggests it's a harder task than meets the eye.
It is, but you are assuming that only a well known IDE team would do it. To me JetBrains is the least likely to be an innovator here because they depend on their reputation for being a mature technology.
Someone like me isn't known at all but it means I have been able to experiment for a long time without pressure, which is how you do real innovation.
JetBrains as a company probably owns 10 million lines of code and it's just really hard to move fast when you're tugging that kind of ball and chain
hiring is hard
it's a high-functioning team swimming in contemporary design and eng practices
code is emerging as an important battleground
OpenAI has the $$$