JetBrains Is Building Course Infrastructure for IDEs — Because 76% Awareness Produces 18% Daily Use
Cloud Platform EngineeringJetBrains launched its Course Creators Program to enable educators to build exercises that run directly inside JetBrains IDEs — accessible through Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Pluralsight. The product context for why this matters is a specific number.
The Adoption Gap
JetBrains’ own developer survey data — consistently one of the largest annual developer surveys by sample size — puts GitHub Copilot awareness at 76% among developers and daily active usage at 18%. That gap is not primarily a discoverability problem. A tool that 76% of developers know about and 18% use daily has a different problem: the value is not materializing in daily workflow often enough to produce habit.
The course infrastructure JetBrains is building is a specific hypothesis about why. The argument is that developer tooling adoption fails not because developers don’t know the tools exist, but because they never learned to use them in the environment where they actually work. A video course about GitHub Copilot is watched outside the IDE. The learning transfer from watching to doing — in a live coding environment with real consequences — requires a separate activation step that many developers never complete.
What the Course Creators Program Does
The program provides a framework for educators to create interactive coding exercises that live inside JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, and others). Students access these courses through existing learning platforms — Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsight — but the exercises execute in the IDE rather than in a browser-based sandbox.
This matters for AI tooling specifically. Teaching someone to use an AI coding assistant effectively requires them to experience it in their actual development environment — seeing how it completes, how it handles their codebase, where it makes mistakes, how to prompt it usefully. A course that can run inside JetBrains IDE with the educator-specified plugins active (including Copilot, Junie, or other assistants) produces a qualitatively different learning experience than video instruction.
Junie and the Skill Manager
JetBrains’ own AI offering — Junie, its autonomous coding agent — is a secondary context for the course infrastructure. JetBrains announced the Skill Manager and Skill Repository in April 2026, frameworks for managing what Junie can do through custom skill packages. Teaching developers to write Junie skills requires the kind of hands-on, in-IDE practice the course framework enables.
The Course Creators Program is therefore both a third-party enablement play (get Copilot/Claude/etc. training happening in JetBrains IDEs) and a first-party one (develop the education layer for JetBrains’ own AI ecosystem).
The Platform Engineering Angle
For platform engineering teams that own internal developer tooling, the adoption gap is a known problem. Teams that successfully deploy AI coding assistants to developer populations consistently report that the productivity gains are uneven: developers who learn to integrate the tool into their workflow see substantial gains; developers who install it and occasionally use completions see modest or negligible ones. The difference is practice in context.
If JetBrains succeeds in building an ecosystem of IDE-native courses — particularly for AI tooling workflows — it creates an enterprise training path that platform teams can point developers to without asking them to leave their development environment to learn how to use it better.
The So What
The 76%/18% gap is the number that explains the JetBrains bet. Awareness without adoption is a training problem, and training problems are solvable with the right environment. The Course Creators Program is a structural response to the observation that developer education delivered outside the IDE produces limited behavior change inside it. Whether it closes the gap meaningfully depends on how many quality courses get built under the program — which is a network effect problem that takes time to resolve. The infrastructure is the bet; the courses are the execution challenge.
Source: The New Stack
Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.
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