Junie for PHPStorm is pretty good

This week, well, mostly today, I've been playing around with Junie for PHPStorm and you know what? It's actually pretty good!

I've been waiting for a while for PHP support and I saw on Twitter (sorry, I forgot who Tweeted about it!) that they'd given it a go, so I installed it into PHPStorm and took it for a whirl.

I had the perfect task for it because I was dealing with a handful of duplicate queries in the application that I wanted to track down and fix. It's not the most exciting task although it's an important one. I gave Junie some context and told it to go away and ensure all duplicate queries are fixed, I limited it to just one part of the application so I could see the results faster. It took a bit of time to think so I watched a YouTube video until I saw the little PHPStorm icon in my dock bouncing, so I switched back and could see it had made a handful of changes. Without checking them, I refresh the application in my browser and sure enough, no more duplicate queries! 🤯

So, I then tasked it with going through the entire application and ensuring there were no other duplicate queries. I was aware of a couple of other places with 1 or 2 and then I left it to do it's thing. Again, once it had finished, I reloaded the application and went right the way through it... no more duplicate queries across the entire application!!

I then inspected the changes to verify they actually made sense, which they did, so I popped them in a Pull Request. I then explored a little bit more and got it to work on a rather simple feature for the application which I could've wrote, but decided to put it to work and see what it could come up with. Whilst the result was what I was expecting, the code was a bit strange, so I manually tweaked some of it to match how I'd have built the feature.

Overall, I was really impressed with it. Unfortunately, I maxed my usage pretty early on so I actually upgraded to the AI Pro package for £7.90 per month. To me, this is absolutely worth it as I can see it coming in useful for brainstorming sessions where you have an idea and maybe want AI to carve out a bit of a path to follow. I'm going to see how AI Pro treats me, but based on what I've gotten out of it so far, I don't think I'd hesitate in going up to AI Ultimate for £15.80 a month if needed!

I've used PHPStorm for years and years, it's the IDE I feel most at home in so the fact I can keep using it but now have access to Junie, is fantastic. I've tried using Cursor but I ended up missing PHPStorm.