I've recently been giving Junie a try in PhpStorm to see how helpful it can be when working on Laravel projects.
If you're not familiar with Junie, it's JetBrains' AI assistant that integrates directly into their integrated development environments (IDEs), including PhpStorm. I mentioned in a previous article that I've been using it to help me debug issues and write new code. So far, it's been a pretty positive experience. There are times when it doesn't quite get things right or misunderstands what I'm asking it to do, but overall, I've found it surprisingly useful.
So I thought I'd record a video showing how to use Junie in PhpStorm. In the video, I try to use Junie to add a new settings page to a fresh Laravel application that is using the Vue.js starter kit.
It's not one of those "Wow, look how amazing AI is!" types of videos (spoiler alert: it actually struggles to build what we need towards the end). But I thought it was a good demonstration of how Junie can help you build features in a Laravel application. It isn't perfect, but it can definitely speed things up when it works well.
P.s - Please excuse the poor audio quality in the video. I only realised during editing that I'd recorded it using my laptop's built-in microphone rather than my usual external one. Ooops!
Top comments (3)
Warning: do not fall into the Junie scam.
youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JUNIE...
Read the thread - there are honest reviews about Junie subscriptions. This is a total scam, expiring tokens, non-refundable purchases, huge usage waste, forced rotation monthly quota, and so on. You will get ten times less usage than any other AI subscription.
P.S. I love JetBrains IDEs, but clearly their subscription and Junie integration is a total mess! Yes, likely they simply can not keep up with subsidised pricing from big AI companies, so their pricing is ridiculously high. However, there is no pardon for such poor integration with their own IDEs for their Junie!
Hey! Thanks for sharing that link. I didn't know about any of this!
I'm still super new to using AI in my workflow, so I'm still trying to figure out which agents/platforms/services are the best ones to fit my workflow. It's a shame, because I love JetBrains IDEs too! I'll probably keep using Junie for a while, and experiment with some other platforms in any spare time I get 😄
My take on AI is that Claude Sonnet is for coding, Opus for architecture\planning\etc. I also tried Cusrsor - it has generous limits and is quite cheap on "Auto" mode, but the quality is far less than Sonnet. Additionally, as an IDE, it is a total mess, so it's good for prompting but not ideal for working with code.