Nineteen years. That's how long I paid for a JetBrains license. ReSharper, then Rider, then the full toolbox. It was the first subscription I ever set up as a developer, and the last one I expected to cancel.
Last month I let it lapse. Not out of frustration. Not because the tools got worse. Because I realized I hadn't opened Rider in six weeks, and I didn't miss it.
How We Got Here
I started in the VB6 days. Drag a button onto a form, double-click it, write some code, hit F5. It felt like the future. The WYSIWYG era made you feel like software development would only get easier from here.
Then it didn't. Web apps killed the form designers. Build chains, package managers, and YAML files nobody fully understood crept in. Terminals started showing up alongside the IDE—first for builds, then for everything else. You'd still set breakpoints and step through code, but more and more of the real work was happening in a black rectangle next to your editor.
Before I knew it, I was spending more time in the terminal than in the IDE I was paying $250 a year for. After two decades of GUI evolution, we'd come full circle.
Then AI Collapsed the Timeline
Today I work across five or six simultaneous terminal sessions. Claude Code handles the API layer in one. EF Core migrations in another. Blazor components in a third. xUnit tests in a fourth. I use Cursor when I need to see a codebase visually, and GitHub Copilot when I'm in VS Code for quick edits.
But the IDE—the thing I built my career around, the tool I could navigate blindfolded—became optional. Not because it's bad. Because the work changed.
I don't type code anymore. I describe architecture in plain English. I sketch data flows on a whiteboard and snap a photo. I write design decisions, review what comes back, and iterate. My job shifted from writing syntax to making decisions and evaluating output.
The coffee break has become a real part of my workflow. I tell the machine what to build, I get coffee, and when I come back there's a pull request waiting. I review the architecture, test the features, check the AI-generated tests and documentation, then iterate and do it again.
The Math That Made Me Cancel
I haven't manually typed code in months. But I'm directly responsible for more shipped code per month than at any point in my career. The velocity, the documentation quality, the test coverage—all higher than when I was doing it by hand in a $250/year IDE.
I can spin up Azure infrastructure and have apps running in production in minutes. I remember when that sentence described a six-month project involving purchase orders, server racks, and a capacity planning meeting. The entire chain—concept to code to cloud—compressed so fast that my toolchain couldn't keep up with my workflow.
A small team with the right tools and mindset can punch significantly above their weight today. That's not a slogan. It's what I see every day.
This Isn't About JetBrains
JetBrains makes great tools. I'd still recommend Rider to anyone who works inside an IDE every day. This isn't a dig at them.
This is about what happened to the job itself. The skills that defined a senior developer for two decades—editor speed, keyboard shortcuts, memorized APIs, efficient debugging—are depreciating. What's appreciating is the ability to clearly articulate intent, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and know what good looks like without having typed every line yourself.
If you're leading a team and haven't fundamentally rethought your development process in the last twelve months, you're not a little behind. You're a lot behind. The gap between teams who've embraced this shift and those who haven't is widening faster than most leaders realize.
Nineteen years of JetBrains. Gone. And I'm shipping more than ever.