New PHP IDE with AI Assistant: Feature Overview and First Impressions

New IDE with PHP Support: First Look

The market for PHP development environments has a new player. A team of enthusiasts, known for their open-source tools for Laravel and Symfony, has introduced a beta version of an IDE codenamed PhpStorm Nova (working title). Not to be confused with the editor from JetBrains — this is a completely independent project built on its own code analysis engine from scratch.

We tested the build and are sharing our first impressions. The main feature of the new product is a built-in AI assistant that doesn't just autocomplete code but understands the context of the entire project.

Key Features

• Smart autocomplete based on AST — The IDE analyzes not only the current file but also connected traits, migrations, and even docblock annotations. It suggests correct types for arguments and return values.
• Built-in debugger with stack visualization — No need to configure Xdebug separately. Just press F9, and the IDE itself starts a PHP server with debugging. The call stack is displayed as a graph.
• Integration with Docker and Laravel Sail — With one click, a container with PHP 8.3, Composer, and Node.js is launched. All settings are stored in the project.
• AI Assistant "Cody" — Writes tests for PHPUnit, refactors legacy code, explains errors in simple language. Works locally without sending code to a server.
• Refactoring for Laravel — Automatic extraction of Eloquent queries into scopes, extraction of validation into Form Requests, renaming routes with updating all references.

First Impressions

The environment turned out to be surprisingly lightweight: it launches in 3 seconds on a laptop with 8 GB of RAM. The interface is minimalist, in the style of VS Code, but with powerful PHP-specific features. The work with composer.json was impressive — the IDE automatically suggests package versions and shows dependency conflicts.

On the downside: there is no support yet for Symfony Forms and Twig templates (promised for the release). Also, a plugin for PhpStan has not been implemented — only a built-in linter is available. But for daily work with plain PHP or Laravel, the tool is already usable.

The beta version is available for free on the project's official website. The developers promise that the final release will remain free for non-commercial projects. Stay tuned for updates on PythonLib — we will prepare a full comparison with PhpStorm and VS Code.

This article was written for the educational portal PythonLib. All mentioned product names are trademarks of their respective owners.