I switched agents last week and it knew nothing about the project. Indexing from scratch, context from scratch, patience from scratch.
Fact
The facts: JetBrains announced support for the Agent Client Protocol in WebStorm - an open standard separating the development environment from the AI agent, so a developer can switch agents without switching editors and without losing project context and indexing. GitHub Copilot works as a protocol server, Claude Code connects through an adapter. The company compares the move to the Language Server Protocol. The announcement does not specify which other environments support the protocol.
The comparison is not marketing, it is accurate. Before LSP every editor wrote its own support for every language and the work grew as a square. After it one protocol did the job for all of them, and the language stopped locking you into an editor.
Today the same arithmetic sits with agents, except the lock costs more. The environment remembers your project and the agent carries the skills. Tie them to each other and swapping one costs you the other.
Every time something becomes a protocol, somebody loses a lock and everybody gains a choice.
We run a fleet of agents daily. A shared protocol means tomorrow's better model gets plugged in rather than endured. I will test it on a real project and say whether it holds.
Official primary sources
JetBrains Blog - The LSP Moment for AI Agents: WebStorm ACPThe visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.