Ctrl twice, the task is off, you keep typing. That is the whole gesture. With it JetBrains separates orchestration from the conversation with the model, and they say so outright: running several tasks at once is not a chat.
Fact
The facts: on 1 October 2026 JetBrains announced an early access program for Air, which it calls an "open system of products for agentic development". Air comes into JetBrains IDEs as a plugin from JetBrains Marketplace or built into the 2026.3 EAP builds. Double-tapping Ctrl opens a prompt window for a new agent session with the current context attached; several agents work at the same time, all sessions are visible in one place across projects, and parallel work is isolated in temporary worktrees. Agents run locally or in the cloud; for long tasks a cloud agent keeps going after you close your machine, but cloud runs currently require a JetBrains AI subscription and are available to organisations with AI seats. Per JetBrains, Air supports Codex, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Claude Agent and Junie out of the box, and other agents connect through the ACP protocol. Junie Lite, their lighter agent for everyday tasks, is free after signing in with a JetBrains Account. The company writes: "Orchestrating several tasks concurrently is fundamentally different from having a conversation with AI" and "No agents? Nothing leaves your machine": with no agent connected, nothing is sent out. The AI Assistant plugin remains available separately on the Marketplace.
Here is what gets overlooked: JetBrains is not selling a model here. It is selling the place where the models work. Microsoft's Copilot, Anthropic's agent and OpenAI's sit side by side in the same window, and the editor is the referee between them.
It is a host's move, and a smart one. Whoever holds the debugger, the project history and the terminal holds the context. The model comes and goes with your subscription. The editor stays.
The models are the guests. The editor holds the key.
The trap is in the worktrees. Five agents in five parallel copies of the code means five merges at the end of the day, and you are the one doing the merging. JetBrains does not promise to solve that, which is honest.
Early access is early access. If you try it, try it on a branch you can throw away. The verdict comes after the first real sprint with two agents. The demo does not count.
Official primary sources
JetBrains - A New Agentic Experience: JetBrains Air in IDEs - EAP Now Open, 01.10.2026The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.