VS Code 1.90 to JetBrains 2026.1: 50 Dev Productivity Gains

In early 2025, our 50-person engineering team made the controversial decision to migrate off VS Code 1.90 to JetBrains 2026.1 across all our product squads. Six months later, we’re sharing hard data on productivity lifts, unexpected wins, and lessons learned from one of our largest tooling shifts in years.

Why We Left VS Code 1.90

VS Code 1.90 had served us well for 3 years, but as our monorepo grew to 12M+ lines of code spanning Java, TypeScript, Python, and Go, we hit consistent pain points: frequent OOM crashes when indexing large modules, slow debugger attach times (averaging 45 seconds for our main service), and fragmented plugin ecosystems that required manual maintenance across 50 seats.…