JetBrains Unveils Central, a Control Plane for Agentic Development, as IntelliJ 2026.1 Opens the IDE to Cursor, Codex, and Any ACP-Compatible Agent
JetBrains launches Central, a governance and execution platform for AI coding agents, alongside IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 with Agent Client Protocol support and the Air agentic IDE in public preview, signaling a decisive pivot toward agent-driven development.
Overview
JetBrains shipped three major announcements in March that together redraw the boundaries of what an IDE is expected to do. IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 arrived with native support for external AI agents through the Agent Client Protocol. Air, an agentic IDE built on the abandoned Fleet project, entered public preview. And on March 24, JetBrains introduced Central, a governance and execution layer that connects agents, tools, and infrastructure into a unified system for managing AI-assisted software delivery at scale.
The three releases share a common thesis: code generation is becoming cheap, and the hard problem is now orchestrating agents, controlling costs, and maintaining quality across teams.
IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 and the Agent Client Protocol
The IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 release adds built-in support for AI agents beyond JetBrains’ own Junie. Developers can now use Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude Agent, and GitHub Copilot directly inside the IDE through the Agent Client Protocol, an open standard co-developed with Zed Industries.
The ACP Registry, a curated marketplace launched in January 2026, lets developers browse and install compatible agents with a single click. Any agent that implements the protocol can integrate without custom IDE-specific work. Cursor confirmed its availability across the JetBrains lineup on March 4, offering developers access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Cursor’s own infrastructure, along with secure codebase indexing and semantic search for navigating large enterprise repositories.
Beyond agent integration, IntelliJ 2026.1 delivers day-one Java 26 support, Kotlin 2.3.20 compatibility, first-class C/C++ coding assistance in multi-language projects, and JavaScript support without requiring an Ultimate subscription. The release also adds quota-free next edit suggestions for Java, Kotlin, and Scala, and grants AI agents native access to connected databases for querying and modifying data sources through natural language.
Air: Fleet Reborn as an Agentic IDE
JetBrains Air, which entered public preview on March 10, represents a strategic repurposing of Fleet, the lightweight IDE that JetBrains abandoned before reaching general availability. Rather than letting Fleet’s architecture go to waste, the company rebuilt it as a dedicated workspace for delegating development tasks to multiple AI agents running concurrently.
The workflow centers on describing tasks that agents execute in local workspaces, Git worktrees, Docker containers, or future cloud environments. A built-in code editor lets developers review and approve agent output before it reaches production. Air currently supports OpenAI Codex, Anthropic Claude Agent, Google Gemini CLI, and JetBrains Junie. The public preview is available for macOS, with Windows and Linux versions promised later.
Alongside Air, JetBrains released Junie CLI in beta, making its AI coding agent fully standalone rather than IDE-extension-only. Pricing for Junie ranges from $10 per month for individuals to $60 per month for enterprise users, with the option to bring existing model subscriptions from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Grok.
Central: The Orchestration Layer
Central is the most ambitious of the three announcements. Positioned as a control and execution plane, it is designed to connect developer tools, external agents, repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration platforms like Slack and Linear into a single managed system.
The platform provides three core capabilities: governance controls including policy enforcement, identity management, and cost attribution; agent execution infrastructure with cloud runtimes and computation provisioning; and an optimization layer that routes tasks to appropriate models and maintains shared semantic context across repositories.
JetBrains framed the need for Central around a gap in the current tooling landscape. As Hadi Hariri, SVP of Operations, stated in the announcement: the company is “increasingly leaning into agents and AI-driven workflows, which is creating a need for better visibility into costs and governance.”
Central’s Early Access Program is set to launch in Q2 2026 with a limited group of design partners.
Industry Context
JetBrains’ pivot arrives amid clear demand. The company’s January 2026 AI Pulse survey of 11,000 developers worldwide found that 90 percent already use AI at work, 22 percent use AI coding agents specifically, and 66 percent of companies plan to adopt coding agents within the next 12 months. Only 13 percent reported using AI across the entire software development lifecycle, a gap that Central is explicitly designed to close.
The broader IDE market is moving in the same direction. Cursor, which built its reputation as a standalone AI-native editor, is now distributing itself through JetBrains’ ACP rather than competing for exclusive use. GitHub Copilot similarly joined the ACP ecosystem. The emerging pattern is one of interoperability: agents implement a single protocol and run wherever developers work, rather than locking users into a particular editor.
For JetBrains, the challenge is balancing a 25-year-old IDE platform with a new paradigm that may eventually make traditional code editing secondary. The company appears to be hedging its bets, investing in both IntelliJ’s continued relevance and Air’s agent-first approach, while using Central as the connective layer between them.