Developer Tooling

IntelliJ IDEA Plugin

The Embabel Agent IntelliJ IDEA plugin provides IDE-level support for developing agents with the Embabel framework. It integrates directly with the IntelliJ platform to give you a cleaner, warning-free development experience.

What It Does

When you annotate methods with Embabel’s core annotations — @Action, @Condition, or @Cost — IntelliJ has no way of knowing that the framework will invoke those methods reflectively at runtime. Without the plugin, the IDE flags these methods as unused, producing false "never used" warnings throughout your agent code.

The plugin registers an ImplicitUsageProvider with the IntelliJ platform that tells the IDE:

Any method annotated with @Action, @Condition, or @Cost is implicitly used by the Embabel Agent framework — do not warn.

This means you can write your agents cleanly without suppressing legitimate IDE inspections or littering your code with @SuppressWarnings.

Without the plugin

@Agent(description = "Summarizes news articles")
class NewsAgent {

    @Action  // ⚠ IntelliJ: "Method 'summarize' is never used"
    fun summarize(article: RawArticle): ArticleSummary {
        // ...
    }
}

With the plugin

@Agent(description = "Summarizes news articles")
class NewsAgent {

    @Action  // ✅ No warning — plugin marks this as implicitly used
    fun summarize(article: RawArticle): ArticleSummary {
        // ...
    }
}

Installation

The plugin is published to the JetBrains Marketplace (plugin ID: 31142).

Via the IDE (Recommended)

1. Open IntelliJ IDEA.
2. Go to Settings → Plugins → Marketplace tab.
3. Search for Embabel Agent.
4. Click Install, then restart the IDE when prompted.

Via the Marketplace Website

1. Visit https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/31142-embabel-agent.
2. Click Get, then follow the browser prompt to open IntelliJ IDEA and install.

Compatibility

As of IDEA 2025.3, the Community and Ultimate editions were merged into a single unified distribution.

Source & Contributing

The plugin source is maintained in its own repository: https://github.com/embabel/embabel-agent-intellij

Contributions are welcome. If you use additional Embabel annotations that should also be treated as implicitly used, please open an issue or pull request against that repository.