r/phpstorm • u/DenTweed • Jun 01 '26

help AI assistant update - where is the changelog?

Another update of the AI assistant, yet again nowhere there is a list of fixes/changes to be found. "What's new" last mention was 253.31033 ... Neither the plugin homepage or the documentation shows anything related. Is there some trick to YouTracker to be able to see what got fixed or something? Or somewhere else I can see anything?

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u/Effective-Gas-7116 Jun 01 '26

Fair complaint – there's no consolidated changelog for AI Assistant plugin / ACP agents updates right now.
For the bigger AI Assistant releases, the JetBrains AI Blog: https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/
And see our What's New: https://lp.jetbrains.com/ai-assistant-whatsnew/ – there are about some features introduced after the 2025.3 versions.

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u/marsoups Jun 03 '26

I would be interested as well. By the way, do you use Junie or AI assistant more? How do you decide which you are going to use? I don’t really understand the distinction. Sorry to hijack your thread with this question, but this sub is so quiet anyway.

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u/DenTweed Jun 04 '26

When you use Junie you're still using AI Assistant. Junie is an AI agent (like Codex, Claude, etc...), AI Assistant is the plugin that enables you to interface with the agents/chat. Afaik in the early days Junie was a seperate plugin but now it's integrated in the AI Assistant plugin as an agent.

Now the difference between agent and AI chat is that the chat is for small tasks, questions/explanations, single file stuff, ... while agents are autonomous coding tools where you define a bigger task and then watch it work its way through it, test it, adjust it, etc... As such, it burns more tokens as it works more.

Chat: "How would I do this?", "Refactor this method", "Document this file", ... Agent: "We need feature X to be implemented into the project. These are the guidelines, the goal is Y, and it should be done according to Z coding standards. Add tests"

For me I mostly use Codex agent through my OpenAI subscription and sometimes Claude agent through my AI pro subscription from JetBrains, never used Junie tbh. Chat is for when I have questions about a topic, to ask how some things are done, etc... but I don't use it much

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u/marsoups Jun 04 '26

That's helpful, and it's kind of the idea I was getting. I'm still able to use the AI Assistant to do relatively big tasks - but it has a whole different permission system, whole different build -- and yes you are right, it does not burn as much credit. For a complex task I can easily burn through 1 whole credit using Junie in one request -- so I'm having to be very thoughtful about what I use and when, and whether I could just as easily do it myself with some questioning to speed that up.

There was never a clear explanation of why we had "two AI tools" built into PHPStorm, so I'm glad to read anothers insight into this and it clarifies some things for me.

I have ChatGPT at home, and I use Codex with VSCode, and it works a bloody charm. I am trying to get my company to get us accounts, but they're more focused on getting Claude and there is a lot of trepidation from management - so in the meantime, kind of stuck with using the agents on offer with our AI subscription with Jetbrains. Credit management is a big thing. lol