I work with AI agents — Codex, Copilot, Claude and others — but it feels a bit too synchronous for my taste. You hand something off, then you wait. Starting a second task in another tab feels messy — context bleeds, you lose track of what’s running where, and you end up managing chaos instead of delegating anything. It is one of many developer experience pain points that are ripe for improvement.

JetBrains launched Air in public preview a couple of weeks ago. The idea: run multiple agents side by side, each isolated in their own Git worktree or Docker container. You define a task with actual context — a class, a method, a specific commit — not just a paragraph of instructions pasted in. The agent runs. When it needs you, you get a notification. Otherwise it keeps going.

Supported agents at launch: Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Junie. You can switch between them per project, or run the same task with two agents and compare the output.

The isolation model is the part that actually matters. Each task gets its own workspace with its own Git state, session history, and tooling. No branch collisions. No agent B tripping over what agent A just changed. You review the output and commit when you’re satisfied.

Their FAQ has one line that stuck with me: most agent tools focus on the model. Air focuses on the workflow around it. That’s the right thing to be solving. The model is close to a commodity at this point. What’s actually hard is managing the work flowing through it.

It’s built on the Fleet codebase — the editor JetBrains killed a while back. Repurposed rather than buried. I’m not sure if that’s clever or sad. Probably a bit of both.

It’s a standalone desktop app, not an IDE plugin. Your existing JetBrains setup handles everything else, Air just handles the agents. On pricing: JetBrains AI Pro or Ultimate subscribers get it included. Otherwise BYOK — connect your own API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google and pay those providers directly.

Cloud mode and team features are on the roadmap. Haven’t used any of it yet to be honest — I do most of my agent work on my Arch machine where I run multiple tools, and Air doesn’t support Linux yet. My Mac is mostly just Claude. So until the Linux version lands, it’s not really in the picture for me.

I’ll write something more useful once it is.