AI developers must work with the tools based on a strong understanding of how they work and the potential pitfalls — keeping control and governance to the fore.
That’s according to Cheuk Ting Ho, developer advocate for AI at JetBrains, speaking at PHPverse 2025.
“Because we’re all going to ‘do’ AI. You can’t escape that,” she said. “Whether we like it or not.”
Therefore organisations must know what they’re trying to achieve with AI tools. Then they can decide on a specific requirement, and whether the AI in question is appropriate for a given task.
In part, asking questions about the AI already being integrated into software tools by third parties or technology partners. Many applications already have embedded genAI copilots, for example.
“Do you know how your AI assistant works? And do you know what it does to your computer? Are there any security risks? Those are the questions you should be asking,” Ho said. “What are the AI assistant and coding agents?”
Often, organisations may need to specify detailed requirements down to the choice of programming language or logic and libraries for the task in question. That’s even with tools supporting natural-language prompts.
Before developers put answers to a prompt into practice, they should evaluate the results.
For example, is the answer given actually correct, based on relevant data? Or are there factors hiding behind the model’s response — particularly any mistakes that can cause problems? Also, AI is like any other tool — it can break down.
Advantages for AI developers are real
However, Ho said a GitHub survey confirms the advantages of coding with AI.
“Using AI coding agents can help understand new languages, to lower the barrier for entry for languages they don’t know. Also it will increase work efficiency, code quality; help avoid or solve problems in their code,” she said. “And it could create more tests to better the test coverages and the documentation.”
Already, JetBrains is seeing “quite a lot” of PHP developer interest and experimentation in AI. After all, AI is in many everyday technologies already, from phone apps to work laptops, in calendars and email.
“So these software programs are designed to interact with the environments, interact with you, and then also it will collect data,” Ho said.
“Yet AI is different from just any application as it could actually make some decisions on your behalf. But you are still responsible for your work. We can’t just like take our hands off the wheel.”
JetBrains PHPverse 2025 saw developers from across the PHP ecosystem gather in Amsterdam to celebrate the PHP scripting language’s 30th anniversary. JetBrains’ PhpStorm is an integrated development environment (IDE) supporting developers working in PHP with features such as smart coding assistance.
In January, JetBrains announced PhpStorm support for .env files.
( Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash )
