IntelliJ's Java and Kotlin engine for VS Code and Cursor reaches release candidate
Victoria Shinder1 min readJetBrains has moved Java and Kotlin by IntelliJ IDEA — an extension that brings IntelliJ IDEA's Java and Kotlin language intelligence to other editors over the Language Server Protocol — to release candidate. It was announced as a preview two months earlier, starting with VS Code and its forks such as Cursor.
Where it stands.
- The RC is the final Early Access build; JetBrains says the foundation for a stable 1.0 is in place and the release "will arrive very soon".
- The extension has been downloaded more than 20,000 times from the Visual Studio Marketplace and the Open VSX Registry.
- JetBrains says it has been dogfooding it on the large repository used to build IntelliJ-based IDEs.
What it does. Besides core assistance — completion, navigation, inspections, quick-fixes and code analysis — the extension offers project-wide refactorings and DAP-based debugging. It also serves coding agents: installed in Cursor, Cursor Agent can use the same language server for semantic code search, navigation and analysis, which JetBrains says gives faster and more deterministic results. The company says it will next write about fully agentic, terminal-based workflows.
The licensing change to note. The RC can be used for 30 days without a licence under the Early Access terms. From the stable release, new users get a 30-day free trial, after which the extension requires an IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate subscription. For teams that adopted it during the free preview inside VS Code or Cursor, that is the date to plan for.