AI Integration Discussion: Netbeans MCP for claude code

[ivan-velikanov]

Hi,

I've been using NetBeans for 20+ years (yeah, I'm that old), and I need to share something that's been bothering me. A month ago, I was happily coding an entire program in NetBeans, typing everything by hand, referring to AI only as a better search engine and sometimes code-generator.

Now because of the shear speed with which an iteration is possible with Claude code, I haven't opened NetBeans in weeks. I'm stuck in Claude Code because that's where the AI assistance is, which is much faster than me, especially given some recent RSI issues I am facing.

The Problem

It's not that I want to abandon NetBeans. I'm being forced to choose between:

• NetBeans: Great refactoring, project management, lightweight, knows Java inside-out
• AI tools: Fast feature generation, but lacking understanding, deep consideration, and orchestration of the big picture; And especially they lack much needed refactoring and modularization workflow where we wish to break code into smaller units as it gets matured and gets each bigger (reminds me of "Practical API Design" by @jtulach )

The result? Given my RSI issues, which is exasperated from copy-pasting between Claude and various IDEs, and the AI taking too long to get things right or reasonable. It's like having a very fast junior developer who either asks clarification for everything it does or just does something which sometimes breaks 10 other things and then spends hours figuring out and fixing it.

What I'm hoping for

A few years ago, the rich tooling of Netbeans was exported out of Netbeans as a language server.

AI tools could actually use NetBeans' refactoring engine instead of blindly changing code. This would enable them to see our call hierarchies before breaking everything.

I guess it is time to provide a MCP Netbeans tool for Claude code to provide Claude code with the simple, yet powerfully rich tooling in Netbeans java ecosystem.

• This will expose NetBeans' code analysis via MCP Tool that AI tools (Claude code) can query.
• AI assistants can request safe refactoring operations
• Netbeans MCP can Export our project understanding in a format (simple json) AI tools can consume

NetBeans actually has advantages here:

• Our refactoring tools are rock-solid
• Call hierarchy and usage analysis already exist
• I feel Netbeans is lighter and more modular
• Already similar this concept was previously implemented with netbeans language servers for VS Code.

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PS: I'm not a plugin developer, I developed a jbang netbeans plugin (with AI) which I internally use (not even open sourced yet). I am mostly a long-time user who is a Netbeans and java loyal user and tired of choosing between good tools and modern AI assistance.

[Chris2011]

I also thought about MCP with NetBeans but atm I have a lot more stuff todo so at the end, you can akso start with AI assistent also with ChatGPT Codex with an empty repo and say: Make an MCP server for NetBeans and a client (NetBeans plugin). I think this will work and I would also do the same.

[ivan-velikanov]

Thank you Chris.
I guess I would also use claude code/claude cli ....
I am not a full time developer, I mostly use (java) coding as a general means of making my day to day office massive documentation, spreadsheet, and presentation work faster, automated and more AI driven for me. And I also don't have time at the moment. So most likely before I take this up, either you or somebody else might do it.

What I feel, not just me the whole community would really benefit from you is, if you could document some nice examples for netbeans plugin building which AI could read and refer to and understand common pitfalls, common guidelines, and best-practices etc. Generally claude is well trained, but since you have done so many plugins you would know better. I feel this is the best way you can replicate yourself (your work) through AI and others who use AI but are not so professional or into this field.

And to clarify and to set the context of my request - by examples I mean your current projects (various Netbeans plugins you have made) itself are nice and I or anyone could use it nonetheless as a reference for AI, there is nothing extra as such needed from your side.

But if you have something extra or particular in mind you could generally start organizing your work with this in mind that AI is good in replicating examples, and any amount of prompt-engineering cannot compensate the accuracy obtained by good examples/example code. They call this context-engineering. This would save new commers with a LOT of errors they wouldn't know how to solve otherwise, or claude would waste significant time and tokens to converge to the correct solution without such reference examples or guidelines.

Also, to be very honest, I really appreciate your work in Netbeans.

[Chris2011]

I'm just a little light with some time to do smth. If you see the history there are more who contributed regulary. If you want context specific help, you can also try codex from ChatGPT. No need to add smth, just add your repo or the fork of netbeans and tell what you want and play around.

I'm doing as good as possible to add new stuff but time is limited.

If you want, just start with smth as I did years ago :). Each help is welcome and appreciated.

[Chris2011]

@ivan-velikanov good news for you today. @emilianbold reached out to me and very long developer for NetBeans and he created this: https://github.com/emilianbold/claude-code-netbeans.git. I tested and it worked very nice. Spread the word! Also you can see a little video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0HN32AQu7w This is really really nice.

[ivan-velikanov]

Thank you, for the information, will check. I really appreciate this.