On 24 March 2026, JetBrains announced Central — a governance and orchestration platform designed specifically for managing AI coding agents in enterprise environments. The platform addresses what JetBrains sees as the next major challenge in agentic development: not building better agents, but controlling, auditing, and coordinating them at scale across teams and repositories.
Central provides three core capabilities. First, governance and control: policy enforcement, identity and access management, observability, auditability, and cost attribution for agent-driven work. Second, agent execution infrastructure: cloud runtimes that allow agents to run reliably across development environments without tying up developer machines. Third, semantic context: shared knowledge across repositories and projects, enabling agents to access relevant context and routing tasks to the most appropriate models or tools.
The launch signals a major strategic shift for JetBrains. The company simultaneously retired Code With Me, its pair programming tool, acknowledging that the era of human-to-human pairing is giving way to human-to-agent collaboration. Data from JetBrains' AI Pulse survey backs this up: 90% of the 11,000 developers surveyed already use AI at work, 22% use AI coding agents specifically, and 66% of companies plan to adopt agents within twelve months.
For context engineers using Claude Code, Central represents both competition and validation. The platform is model-agnostic and designed to work with any agentic tool — including Claude Code — but its focus on governance and cost control highlights enterprise concerns that Anthropic will need to address as Claude Code scales beyond individual developers into team-wide deployments.
