Retrospective: Switching from VS Code 1.90 to JetBrains 2026.1 – Productivity Gains for 50 Engineers
In 2025, a 50-engineer team migrated from VS Code 1.90 to JetBrains 2026.1, citing performance issues in large multi-language codebases. After an 8-week phased rollout, the team observed significant productivity improvements across debugging, search, and tooling downtime. The switch yielded a 22% increase in feature delivery velocity, with benefits outweighing higher licensing costs within 4.5 months.
- ▪The team migrated from VS Code 1.90 due to frequent crashes, slow debugging, and plugin maintenance issues in a 12M+ line monorepo.
- ▪Debug session startup improved from 45 to 8 seconds, and code search latency dropped from 12 to 1.2 seconds after switching to JetBrains 2026.1.
- ▪Weekly tooling downtime decreased from 2.1 to 0.4 hours per engineer, and feature delivery velocity increased by 22%.
- ▪Initial challenges included a learning curve, plugin incompatibilities, and 40% higher license costs, which were mitigated through training and custom tooling.
- ▪The productivity gains offset the increased license costs within 4.5 months, and the team plans to adopt JetBrains AI Enterprise for further improvements.
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