In our industry, things move fast. There is always something new, something changing, or something worth keeping an eye on.
Here is our look back at what happened at JetBrains in 2025, in a news-style recap:
JetBrains continues to evolve alongside the software development landscape, helping individuals and organizations build, ship, and maintain software with greater focus and confidence. As the industry changes, especially in the age of AI, we remain committed to creating tools and experiences that align with how developers want to work – and 2025 was no exception.
This past year brought important milestones across our products, our business, and the communities we support. From progress in AI-powered development to continued growth in enterprise adoption, it was a year of momentum.
For a detailed overview of our achievements and noteworthy moments from the year gone by, explore the full JetBrains Annual Highlights here.
Pedro shows the tools available in Visual Studio that make XAML development more productive, with a particular focus on XAML Live Preview.
⌚ Chapters: 00:00 Welcome 01:40 Typing XAML vs using tooling 06:00 Using XAML Live Preview 08:10 Modifying the UI while app is running with Hot Reload 12:25 Modifying a more advanced UI 24:45 Review of additional XAML tools 26:30 Using the Live Visual Tree 29:50 Using XAML tools in WPF apps 33:30 Wrap-up
Note: Robert and Pedro were not able to show how you turn off the toolbar that provides access to the XAML tools. You can control this by going to All Settings | Debugging | XAML Hot Reload and checking or unchecking Enable in-app toolbar.
Today, we’re expanding what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do with GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 bringing stronger support for deeper analysis, multi-step work, and visual creation.
GPT-5.5 Thinking is now available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments as GPT-5.5 Reasoning and is rolling out across Microsoft 365 Copilot in Copilot Chat, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is rolling out to Copilot in PowerPoint and coming soon to Copilot Chat.
Together with Work IQ, these updates help Copilot deliver more focused, relevant, and complete outputs for analysis, creation, and complex work.
Our team will continue to refine the experience based on your feedback.
For more details, learn more about GPT-5.5 Thinking here and ChatGPT Images 2.0 here.
This blog post was created with the help of AI tools. Yes, I used a bit of magic from language models to organize my thoughts and automate the boring parts, but the geeky fun and the in C# are 100% mine.
AspireMonitor is a Windows tray app that puts your Aspire AppHost status one click away. No browser tabs. No switching context. Click the tray icon, see what’s running, Start/Stop your app, or pin the resources you actually care about in a compact mini window.
Why it exists
If you use Aspire, you know the dashboard is useful—but you don’t want a browser tab open all day. You’re writing code, not monitoring. AspireMonitor solves the friction: a lightweight tray icon that gives you “is my API up?” and “what URL does this service run on?” without leaving your IDE.
Why it’s useful
v1.4.0 ships with two killer features:
The mini window pins only the resources you care about (configure once: web, store, gateway) with their live URLs and Start/Stop buttons. The main window shows the full resource list when you need it.
Start now works correctly—it stays disabled with ⏳ Starting Aspire... (12 / 90s) so you know when resources are actually ready. Stop actually stops. URLs are real (http://localhost:5021), not generic “Open” links.
When ChatGPT launched everyone was predicting that developers would soon be obsolete.
This was about the same time we launched Open SaaS, our free, open-source SaaS starter. Using the same logic, you'd have expected that AI would have killed boilerplate starters by now. But we noticed the opposite trend.
Open SaaS launched and grew during the vibe coding boom
Open SaaS just crossed 14,000 GitHub stars and its entire growth happened right in the middle of the vibe coding boom.
This surprised us. So we decided to talk to 40 of our users to learn why they turned to Open SaaS.
After conducting 40+ user interviews, we noticed a trend: AI was unlocking all kinds of new builders.
Career devs, DevOps engineers, PMs, an ex-woodworker, a marketer with zero coding experience, and more were getting inspired to start on their Ideas. These were people who always had a SaaS idea but never had the time or skills, or people who were getting inspired to build new apps on top of AI.
Regardless of which type they were, it was AI that unlocked them.
"Two years ago I didn't believe I could build an application... So it's like kind of magic for me."
— Leo, ex-marketer who built Messync
Messync — built by Leo, an ex-marketer with zero coding experience
"If there was no Wasp, I don't think I would even start building this."
— Sergio, 20-year backend veteran who built CTOBox
Another one of our users with no React or Node.js experience built a SaaS app and sold it to a major accounting firm for ~$100k.
And the most surprising fact of all: about half of those interviewed were people who had never built a full-stack app before.
AI gave them the confidence and inspiration to start, but a lot of them turned to Open SaaS to help them focus their efforts.
Using Claude Design to design a landing page for Open Vibe, our new vibe code course
AI tools are getting insanely good. With Claude Design you can scaffold a professional-looking landing page in about an hour. Slap it into Claude Code, add on more components and CRUD logic, and you're almost done.
But it's things like Stripe webhooks, auth edge cases, environment management, deployment, and background jobs that really trip up builders.
These aren't necessarily code problems, they're architecture problems. And AI is great at generating code within a clean, working architecture, but you've got to have one first.
"Open SaaS made me feel secure, like I am not cutting any corners. Just using AI would make it harder to sleep at night."
— Robbie, musician who built PeakMastering
PeakMastering — built by Robbie, a musician. Trusted by YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and Fender.
"With Next.js App Router, I was constantly fighting the LLM to get the syntax right. Svelte runes were just the Wild West."
— TK Garrett, ex-woodworker who built PlotTree
PlotTree — built by TK Garrett, an ex-woodworker turned developer
After talking with Open SaaS users, we heard the same thing over and over again: having a solid, clean codebase to start with drastically improved the perfomance of AI-coding agents and tools.
And that makes sense, because when you use an opinionated, boilerplate codebase like Open SaaS, you've effectively already decided the architecture of your app for the AI and it no longer needs to spend resources on these decisions, or communicating with you in order to make them.
In the end, you can just let AI handle WHAT you want built because Open SaaS (or any other good boilerplate) already handles HOW it should be built.
Combining them solves for that tedious 10% that kills most projects.
"If you start with Open SaaS, 80% of the pains of vibe coding are taken care of for you already."
— Kenny Rogers, vibe coding educator
"It covers 99% of what I need without me babysitting the AI."
— TK Garrett
This is why Open SaaS grew steadily to 14k stars through every AI milestone — Cursor blowing up, Karpathy coining "vibe coding," and Claude Code launching.
The Open SaaS repo reached 14k GitHub stars on April 2026.
AI is empowering more people to become builders and entrepreneurs. But you still have to actually ship something, and few end up doing that.
The ones who do, they tend not to build or reinvent auth and payments from scratch. They start with a foundation that handles it for them, point their AI tools at it, and focus on what makes their app unique.
Open SaaS is free, open-source, and ready to go. We're constantly updating it to be the best full-featured SaaS boilerplate out there. Here's what you get out of the box:
Auth with Email, Google, GitHub, Slack, and more (no 3rd-party service needed)
Background Jobs with PG Boss (no 3rd-party)
Payments with Stripe, Polar.sh, or LemonSqueezy
AI Agent Skills and Memory files included
ShadCN UI components
Example apps to learn from
Email with SendGrid, Mailgun, or SMTP
End-to-end type safety
Star us on GitHub if you think more people should know about it.
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This blog post was created with the help of AI tools. Yes, I used a bit of magic from language models to organize my thoughts and automate the boring parts, but the geeky fun and the 
in C# are 100% mine.
