landed in my inbox.
I ended up spending an afternoon testing
Junie, an AI coding agent from
JetBrains. I used it to debug code in PhpStorm.
First experiment: debugging in OpenLucius
I’d previously fixed a simple bug myself. I deliberately reverted that
change so I could test whether Claude Code would independently identify
and fix the problem.
It’s an interesting time to be a Drupal developer. There’s a lot to
learn, and developments are moving at a rapid pace.
Here are some Drupal modules I’ve noted down to explore further:
AI and Drupal: so much is happening
A great test case for discovering what agentic AI development can mean
in practice.
I also uninstalled JetBrains Air, but I still need to investigate the
exact cause of the problem. So this isn’t a definitive conclusion about
Junie or PhpStorm, but it is something to keep an eye on.
Until now, I’d mainly been experimenting with frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude through their AI chat interfaces. But I’ve finally found the time to take the plunge into agentic coding myself.
What I really like about the PhpStorm integration is that you can view
the AI’s changes directly in the IDE and compare them with the original
code. You can review the proposed changes and revert them if necessary.
From AI chatbot to CLI and the PhpStorm IDE
My first experiences with Junie and Claude Code have been positive. They
help me investigate and fix bugs more quickly, and give me a better
understanding of what agentic development can mean in practice.
After working with Junie for a while, my MacBook suddenly became
incredibly slow. That was new to me, as I don’t normally experience
this at all.
[edit] Pro tip: don’t work in your ‘master’ branch, especially not when doing agentic stuff 😉
Also, agentic coding and security are a whole other chapter that you should definitely look into if you get started, before things go haywire with your system. You should be very intentional with the access you grant the agent, and maybe run it contained. There is infromation about this in this video from the Drupal Association [/edit]
The next AI agent on my list is Claude
Code, which I’ve already read a
lot about.
An afternoon with ‘Junie’ in PhpStorm
There’s an incredible amount of things happening in the world of Drupal and AI. It’s very exciting, but almost impossible to keep up with. I’d been planning for a while to seriously dive into agentic coding. I feel a little late to the party, but at the same time, I get the impression that many organizations haven’t got the faintest idea that this revolution is happening.
To be continued 🚀
I’ve since taken my first steps with it, too.
There’s an incredible amount to keep up with and explore, from AI
agents in the IDE and through the CLI to new possibilities within Drupal
itself.
The power of AI in your IDE
I recently also watched the Driesnote at DrupalCon Rotterdam
2026. Dries Buytaert
pointed out that there’s happening so much around AI and Drupal, that
he could fill two Driesnotes with it.
The first, relatively simple tasks were no problem. Junie quickly found
a bug. A more challenging issue, uploading files to tasks, took
longer, but eventually it seemed to find and fix that bug too.
Experiments like this make it interesting to compare different agents.
How well do they understand the context of an existing Drupal
application? How accurately do they identify the root cause of a bug,
and how useful are the changes they propose?
- Drupal best practices;
- security and access control;
- code quality and maintainability;
- scalability;
- potential regressions and unintended side effects.
Editorial note: I also used AI tools to help structure and edit this
article. The experiments and observations are based on my own
development experience.
One notable downside: my MacBook slowed to a crawl
Then, of course, there’s the final check in Git, your undo button. I can see exactly what
the AI has changed and assess for myself whether everything is correct.
Although, this really was far too easy for Claude Code, which even takes
your Git history into account. And endless more context, if you prompt.
At the same time, it’s still important to critically review the
generated code, check the changes yourself, and maintain high standards
of quality.
That says it all. There are so many new developments and possibilities.
It got me excited: there’s plenty of new stuff to explore and learn
about.
Next up: Claude Code
I then gave it this prompt:
I’m curious to see how Claude Code compares with Junie, especially when
working with an existing Drupal codebase. How well does it understand
the architecture? How does it handle more complex bugs? And how much
control do you retain over the changes?
Things to look out for include:
On the task board in OpenLucius, I found a bug that was causing problems
in the production environment: adding files to tasks wasn’t working
correctly. The screen started flickering, and the behavior was clearly
not what it should be. There was also far too much spacing in the file
upload area.
Using Claude Code from PhpStorm
AI coding tools are being compared extensively, and Claude Code
regularly ranks highly in lists and benchmarks. See, for example, the
LLM coding
leaderboards.
And this is the response I got:
I closed PhpStorm, and the slowdown disappeared. As soon as I reopened
PhpStorm, the problem quickly returned.
AI can take a lot of work off your hands, but ultimately, I’m still
responsible for the quality of the code.
Plenty to explore.
If I’d had to investigate all of this manually, I would probably have
spent a lot more time on it.
I figured somehow, heck let’s try that, maybe be a good place to start.
After a bit of installation hassle, I was quickly surprised by how well
this AI assistant understood the existing code and how effectively it
helped me track down and fix bugs.
Dries also mentioned that many Drupal developers are now using AI agents
through the command line.
Even more to explore
I’ve been using frontier models from ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok through
the browser for quite some time, switching between them to see what
works best. But now I really wanted to take the next step: getting
started with agentic AI via the CLI / within an IDE.
To be continued
I decided to try it out for the first time in
OpenLucius. Over the past
few months, I’ve been updating this Drupal distribution to Drupal 11
(the first beta version is now available). To be honest, I still did a
lot of the work manually, with some help from AI chatbots such as
ChatGPT.
In PhpStorm, you can select Claude Code as an agent. So you don’t
necessarily have to install Claude Code through the CLI first. If you
prefer setting it up through the command line, you can follow the
official Claude Code installation
guide.
There was also something I wasn’t so happy about.
If I remove a file via /files in a group, it should show a activity
stream item, but it doesn’t. Can you fix that?
I’ll definitely continue experimenting with Claude in the coming weeks.
During my research, I also came across a few interesting projects and
tools that I’d like to look into further:
Planet Drupal
AI
Drupal AI
Claude
Junie
PhpStorm
OpenLucius
AI Development
