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newsHacker News·25 Oct 2026·hmokiguess

JetBrains Thinkrail

JetBrains open-sourced ThinkRail, an agentic IDE built on the pi coding agent with git-worktree workspaces per task, living specs and reusable skills.

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ThinkRail is the agentic IDE that gets better every time you use it — learning your project through living specs today, and building its own capabilities tomorrow. We built a rich interface around the pi coding agent, isolated work into separate workspaces, and gave the agent durable project knowledge through living specs and reusable skills. Next, we're adding full extension support, so ThinkRail can create the tools it needs based on how you actually work. Website: thinkrail.ai · Blog: thinkrail.ai/blog ⭐ If you find ThinkRail useful, give it a star — it helps others discover it. A pi session and the change it made, scoped to an isolated git-worktree workspace. What you get Isolated workspaces. Open any git repo as a project and cut workspaces from it as git worktrees, each with its own branch and working directory. Agents work in parallel without touching your checkout; merge the good branch, delete the rest. You can also attach existing worktrees or explicitly work in the project folder itself. Finished and dormant workspaces settle onto a per-project shelf on their own — when their pull request merges or closes, or after a quiet week — and come back the moment you work in them. The topbar shows where the active branch stands against origin and its pull request, with the next step one click away: publish, push, or open a PR described from the plan, the commits, your PR template, or an agent-written draft. Once a GitHub PR is open it shows the CI checks and review decision, and lets you mark it ready, hand failing checks or a diverged branch to the agent, merge it with the repository's last-used method, reopen it, or delete the remote branch. A real IDE around the agent. A splittable workbench of Monaco editor tabs, a Files tree with live git change marks and a Changed view, terminals, and documents — all scoped to the active workspace. Leave anchored review comments on files and diffs and send them to a chat as structured context, or open the worktree in your installed IDE. Chats that stream like the engine thinks. Several concurrent pi sessions per workspace, each with its own model and live token and cost readout. Steer a running turn or queue a follow-up, delegate to subagents, and work a shared plan the agent updates and you edit — each completed step can be committed and reviewed on its own. Specs as ground truth. A connected graph of SPEC.md files lives beside the code; the agent reads, searches, and maintains it through dedicated spec_* tools, …