Twenty years of code smarts, now on tap in any editor
JetBrains now serves IntelliJ's Java and Kotlin intelligence over LSP to VS Code, Cursor, and the terminal agents beyond them. Also today: a worm loose in npm's most-installed packages, and a browser for Vercel's eve agents.
Today's Art Direction
The Power Company
A mid-century electric-utility ad: turquoise stock, cream service bulletins, one tangerine spark.
Postwar electric utilities sold modernity itself, in flat spot inks, friendly appliances, marquee slab type, and a brush-script promise floating over every headline. Today's page borrows that register for a service-provider landing: the hero is a poster panel, the sections are printed service bulletins, compatibility is a coverage board, and the bad news arrives as an outage notice. Screenprint grain and a little misregistration keep the whole thing paper rather than plastic.
A worm is loose in npm's cache aisle
Aikido reports an active Shai-Hulud attack that compromised keyv, flat-cache, file-entry-cache, and the cacheable family, packages behind roughly two billion monthly installs, with more than 400 further packages infected downstream. The preinstall payload harvests npm and GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, and environment files; update to patched releases and rotate anything a build machine could see.
Tooling
IntelliJ goes LSP
JetBrains released a preview extension that serves IntelliJ IDEA's Java and Kotlin intelligence over the Language Server Protocol, so VS Code, Cursor, and any LSP-capable editor can run the completion, navigation, and refactoring that used to require the full IDE. The announcement is plain about the reason: agentic development is changing how software gets built, and internal trials wired the same server into Claude Code and Codex with what JetBrains calls very promising results, including lower token consumption.
Install
The preview extension is live on the Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX.
Connect
Point it at a Java or Kotlin project. Maven, Gradle, and Bazel builds are supported.
Billing
Free during the preview. After that, service runs on an IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate subscription.
Service area
| Environment | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| IntelliJ IDEA | Included | The original service area, nothing changes. |
| VS Code | Preview | Full extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace. |
| Cursor and VS Code forks | Preview | Installs from the Open VSX registry. |
| Claude Code | Trials | Internal experiments only; JetBrains says numbers are coming. |
| Codex | Trials | Same internal experiments, same forthcoming write-up. |
A browser for eve agents
Vercel gave agents on its eve platform a browser: mount the extension and an agent can navigate pages, read content, click, fill forms, and inspect console and network activity, all inside a sandbox behind a domain allowlist. Cookies, storage, and credentials stay out of the model's reach by design.
Next.js 16.3 lands
Next.js 16.3.0 stabilizes instant navigation, switches on Turbopack's build filesystem cache by default, and deprecates the edge runtime in favor of a self-contained replacement.
Technique
Expertise still pays the bill
Sean Goedecke argues that language models reward expertise: an engineer who can name the right pattern and judge the output gets categorically better results than one prompting from outside the field. The same holds for design work, where knowing the name of an idiom is half the prompt.
Workflow
Team standards as agent skills
Tikal published adlc-team-skills, thirty-plus version-controlled skills that load a team's coding standards, architecture decisions, and verification gates into Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex at the start of every session. The premise is blunt: speed is solved, and trust is the new bottleneck.
Code as the proposal
Figma's write-up on shipping nested folders doubles as a field report on agent-era teamwork: engineers opened pull requests instead of debating requirements, the designer pushed code, and a merged demo settled questions a document never could. Worth reading for the role changes alone.
Design Move
The coverage board
When a product's story is what it plugs into, skip the logo wall. Build a coverage board instead: one row per environment, a plain status word (included, preview, trials), and one honest note about the limits of that row. It reads like a utility's service area, it stacks cleanly on small screens, and it turns integration claims into checkable facts.
What keeps it honest: status words stay factual rather than promotional, every row carries its caveat, and nothing earns a row until it actually works. Use it on SaaS integration pages, plugin and extension landings, or an agency's service-area section.
Prompt Lab
Recreate today's art direction with your AI builder of choice. Paste, then swap in your own service business.
Build a one-page landing site for a local service business, styled as a mid-century electric-utility advertisement. Page archetype: service-provider landing with a marquee hero, a three-step hook-up band, a service coverage table, and one outage notice panel. Ground the page in a flat turquoise field (#2F9C92), no texture. All running text sits on warm cream panels (#F7EFD9) in deep petrol ink (#0C302E). Accents: tangerine (#E4592A) for spark marks, warning bands, and labels; mustard (#D9A62B) for small highlights. Type: a heavy slab display face (Alfa Slab One) for the headline and section titles, a plain grotesque (Work Sans) at 19px with 1.7 line height for body, and a 1950s brush script (Yellowtail) for one short flourish line above the headline. Never set body text in the script. Hero: one large cream poster panel with a thick petrol keyline border and a small solid offset shadow. Inside: the script flourish, a two-line slab headline, a two-sentence deck, one solid petrol button with cream text, and a flat screenprint-style illustration of a plug reaching a wall outlet. Sections are service bulletins: a small reversed caps label (SERVICE BULLETIN NO. 2) above a slab title. Include a numbered three-step hook-up band (three cream cards, big slab numerals, one sentence each), a coverage table listing each service area with a plain status word (included, preview, trials) and one honest note per row, and one outage notice panel with a diagonal-striped warning band across its top edge. Guardrails: body text at least 18px with line height 1.6 or more; petrol on cream for all small text; no text over illustrations; no neon, gradients, or glow; corner radius 6 to 10px only; real hover states on links and buttons at about 150ms with a prefers-reduced-motion guard; no fake search fields or toggles; no legible text inside generated images.
Runs in Lovable, v0, Beaver Builder AI, Bolt, or Figma Make.
The IDE spent twenty years as a building you moved into. Today JetBrains started selling the wiring on its own, and once intelligence runs like a utility, the interesting question is who reads the meter.
Sources
- IntelliJ IDEA Goes LSP: Java and Kotlin Intelligence Comes to VS Code, Cursor, and Agentic Flows (JetBrains)
- Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack (Aikido)
- Give your eve agent a browser (Vercel changelog)
- Next.js v16.3.0 release notes (GitHub)
- LLMs reward expertise (Sean Goedecke)
- adlc-team-skills: team coding standards for Claude Code and Codex (Tikal, GitHub)
- Code, craft, and the making of nested folders (Figma)
Issue No. 089, Tuesday, August 4, 2026. Set in Alfa Slab One, Work Sans, Yellowtail, and Courier Prime. Palette: turquoise field, cream stock, petrol ink, tangerine spark, mustard trim. Made in Claude Code on Fable 5; images by gpt-image-2. Follow @artdirdaily on X.
A field experiment from the team behind Beaver Builder AI.