OpenMage coding with AI tools?

[colinmollenhour]

Just curious if anyone has had much success with AI coding tools? I've played around some with:

• PhpStorm + Github Copilot
  • This is what I'm using currently, but I don't use it much. Occasionally the autocompletion suggestion is magic, but often it hallucinates, so it's a bit distracting.
• PhpStorm + ClaudeMind
  • The AI was pretty good, but the plugin is too buggy and I hit too many rate limits on my Anthropic API key.
• VSCode + Cline (with Claude 3.5 Sonnet)
  • Seemed promising, but I would run into API rate limits on my Anthropic API key in the middle of it working which is frustrating.
• Continue.dev and other VS Code forks
  • I haven't tried these recently, but they seemed to not be any better than VS Code plus an extension.

The one promising thing I haven't tried yet is Aider + Deepseek. With Deepseek's large context limit and Aider's ability to cache context and refine what files are included using .aiderignore I think this could work really well. However, the learning curve is a bit steeper so I've not been able to invest enough time to set it up and try it out properly.

Overall, it seems that for small and completely new projects like a Node.js microservice there is a ton of potential, but the OpenMage codebase is too large to have AI write large chunks of good code, and it's mostly the autocomplete that can save you a few seconds here and there.. Has anyone else had better luck getting AI to boost your productivity when coding with OpenMage?

[fballiano]

IMHO there are multiple aspect at play here:

• magento's lack of documentation -> training of the models is not that great
• stackoverflow super old content, many times suggesting wrong or outdated practices -> poor LLMs suggestions
• large codebase -> IDE AI plugins can't handle it

If you sum all of the above... you get a lot of bad AI suggestions, which IMHO are much worse than not having the suggestion at all.

So, for the time being, I disable all AI feature in the IDE, and manually ask stuff to Claude/R1 that I review and copy/paste myself. Not a great experience but worth it sometimes.

[colinmollenhour]

Here's an example of using Aider to create some simple models. My .aiderignore file looks like this:

/*
!app/code/core/

And to keep the context small, I used this to run aider:

cd app/code/core/Mage/Customer
aider --subtree-only

Then here is my session (using Claude 3.5 Sonnet):

2025-02-07_18-34-48.mp4

So it depends on what you're doing. If tweaking the .aiderignore a bit and running it from different subtrees gets you good results and is worth your time, it seems like it's getting pretty promising as far as using context effectively without being overwhelmed. This test cost $0.09. You could probably burn through a couple bucks a day easily at that rate, but Deepseek is a lot cheaper.

So it may be that an effective strategy is to use different .aiderignore files that are specific to the context you need at the time.

Here is the patch after asking it to add the table to config.xml:
0001-feat-Add-customer-subscription-model-and-database-ta.patch

Edit: Adding "The install-1.0.0.php file should have been an upgrade." it correctly moved the install-1.0.0.php file to app/code/core/Mage/Customer/sql/customer_setup/upgrade-1.6.2.0.7-1.6.2.0.8.php and updated the <version> in config.xml as well. So it seems to have decent smarts when it comes to the "Magento Way".

[fballiano]

for magento, creating submodels/embedding, it's for sure the way to go

[sreichel]

2-3 years ago i tried to create a M1 module via ChatGTP.

First it made suggestions to create an M2-moudole, but after more detailed instructions and linking to SE, it was able to print correct moudule-structure.

It start with "please create an openmage module with vendor X and module name Y."

It may help, but at the moment any expierenced dev should be faster to create an extension. (n98-skeleton, module creator, ...). I dont believe it can create complex code right now. (e.g. admin config fields with dropdown fields, dependencies ...)

[colinmollenhour]

I've used Claude before to generate test cases for a different project with good success. I bet aider would be able to generate test cases for openmage pretty well without much work (adding enough context but not too much) . Especially the reasoning models should be good at this.

[sreichel]

Pinned https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider 👍

[sreichel]

jetbrains/phpstorm also offers AI support at $10/month. Maybe use it for generating unit tests?

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2024/02/ai-for-php-how-to-automate-unit-testing-using-ai-assistant/

Use funding for it (at least for 2-3 months?)

[kiatng]

I use cursor + Claude for a few months now. For me, it's amazing, may be I have low expectations. It's USD20/month, totally worth it. For OpenMage, it gets it right 50% of the time. For other, like new Python project, it provides 100% of the code, since I know next to nothing. It makes it much easier to experiment with AI tech such as LangChain.

[JesperHerrloff]

If you can code it is okay to use AI, but if you cannot understand the code it can open up security issues and hard to debug code.

I use PhpStorm with AI, but I only sometimes ask about feedback about some performance related stuff to get some other views of the issue :)

[pquerner]

I only have this enabled from within Phpstorm:

and it works nice enough. So far its getting pretty good at guessing what I am trying to accomplish.
Plus, Magicento helps out too.

I dont want my IDE to talk to an "AI" on the internet for code completion. I think thats wrong.

[sreichel]

I'd not use it for generating core-code, but if it can automatically can create unit-test it would be a huge help. It does not need to be nearly perfect.

• add test classes
• add test methods for all public methods (even empty stubs would help)
• ...