Can AI agents automate IntelliJ IDEA?

IntelliJ IDEA is automatable today through the bundled first-party MCP Server plugin. This record is IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2 and later. It is not Junie, not VS Code, and not another JetBrains IDE. From 2025.2 the MCP Server plugin is bundled and enabled by default. Enable it under Settings | Tools | MCP Server. The opened help page documents auto-configuration for detected clients, plus manual SSE, stdio, and HTTP stream configs. An optional brave mode runs shell commands or run configurations without confirmation. Documented tool groups on that page include analysis, code insight, database, debugger, execution, file, formatting, inspection, patch, read, refactoring, search, skill search, terminal, universal, and VCS. The full live list is in Settings | Tools | MCP Server | Exposed Tools and is not copied here. At least one database tool is documented as unavailable on free subscription plans. From 2025.3 IntelliJ IDEA is a unified product: core Java and Kotlin features stay free, and Ultimate is a paid subscription with a 30-day trial. The official CLI launcher opens projects and can format, inspect, diff, merge, and install plugins. The official plugin SDK targets JDK 21 and supports Java and Kotlin. No public product REST API for controlling the IDE was established. Computer-use viability is unassessed. MCP scores 8; the launcher CLI scores 5. MCP is the best path because it is the vendor-documented agent surface over the running IDE.

Best path today: mcp · Overall automatability: 8/10