Alright, folks. Remember that article I wrote not long ago about testing JetBrains AI Pro with a glimmer of hope and a drawer full of half-broken dreams? Well, guess what—I’m back. And the story didn’t get much better.

Let me cut straight to the chase: JetBrains AI Pro still isn’t quite there yet. Yes, it improved. Yes, it now scans and understands your whole project. But sadly, the AI still refuses to touch your code. It’s like having a backseat driver who points at every mistake but never takes the wheel—even when you’re clearly steering straight into a ditch.

Meanwhile, my still undefeated champion in the AI coding arena is Cursor.com, which not only edits your code but rewires entire scripts across your project like a caffeinated full-stack developer on a deadline. One prompt, and boom—your whole Laravel project is suddenly cleaned up, fixed, and even politely commented. JetBrains? It’ll show you a nice diff... but won’t lift a finger.

And that’s the real heartbreak here. PHPStorm, in my opinion (and probably yours if you’ve touched PHP in the last decade), is the undisputed king of PHP editors. It's rock solid. Fast. Smart. Comfortable. But with its current AI, it feels like a Ferrari being driven by someone too polite to turn the key.

So what does that leave us with? Using Cursor inside the dreaded Visual Studio Code. The editor that—let’s be honest—wants to be your best friend but keeps spilling your coffee and hiding your files. Who at Microsoft decided that 5-pixel wide indented tabs were the way to go? Is this a punishment? Is there a hidden setting called “Show folder tree like a normal human would read it”?

Come on, Bill Gates. You may have stepped back from Microsoft, but please—just one call to the VS Code team. Tell them that some of us work on actual projects and not just  hello-world.html. We need a file explorer that doesn’t require a microscope and psychic powers.

So where do we stand?

• JetBrains AI Pro: Promising, but too passive. Like an intern who’s read your entire codebase but refuses to type.
• Cursor.com: Still the one to beat. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done—fast and across the entire project.
• VS Code: Functional, but frustrating. Great AI, awful UX. One more sub-sub-folder with a 3-pixel indent and I’m starting a fire. 
• For now, I keep asking Cursor to make all the changes—refactors, fixes, full-project tune-ups—and as soon as I approve them, I switch right back to PHPStorm to continue editing like the civilized developer I pretend to be. It’s like having a construction crew remodel the house, then walking in with a paintbrush and proudly claiming you did the work. 

Dear JetBrains: give your AI the green light to actually edit stuff. We believe in you. We really do.

Until then, back to fighting the tab widths and whispering “please don’t crash” before every Composer update.