About
I’m Vlad Annenkov, also known as vakosta. I’m a software engineer on the Rider team at JetBrains, based in Madrid.
Most of my work is about helping developers work with code. That used to mean editor infrastructure, completion, and navigation. These days, it also means giving AI agents access to the IDE’s understanding of a codebase.
From editors to agents
At JetBrains, I designed and built Rider’s shared infrastructure for agent skills, hooks, and MCP integrations. I own its technical direction and work with other Rider teams and the central AI Assistant team to turn that infrastructure into useful features.
Some of that work is public:
- The refactoring skill connects agents to Rider’s refactoring engine. I developed and shipped the skill and evaluate agent workflows on real engineering tasks.
- Code quality hooks bring the IDE’s inspections into the agent’s workflow. I developed and shipped these alongside the agent infrastructure.
- Type Dependency Diagram makes relationships between types visible. I built the initial MVP during my internship and later developed and shipped the feature in Rider.
I’ve also built completion infrastructure for Rider’s new editor engine and worked on integrating AI completion with standard completion. Latency, suggestion stability, and code validation are all part of that work.
What I’ll write about
The interesting questions tend to sit between the components:
- Agent tooling: how skills, hooks, and tool interfaces shape what an agent actually does with a codebase.
- IDE internals: the architecture and performance work behind completion, refactoring, and a responsive editor.
- Evaluation: testing workflows on real tasks, looking at failures, and measuring time and cost alongside correctness.
I want this blog to be a place to work through those questions: implementation notes, experiments, and the trade-offs that don’t fit neatly into release notes.
Before my current role
I worked on a cloud IDE at 1C-Soft, building support for embedded languages with ANTLR4 and Xtext and improving SQL code assistance. Along the way, I contributed a debugger fix to Eclipse Theia. I studied Computer Science at HSE University.
You can find me on GitHub and LinkedIn, or follow new posts via RSS.