Level 5
I've been through this exact "extension bloat" cycle. If you're on PHP 8.5 and Laravel 13, you definitely have some redundancy fighting for CPU cycles.
My recommended "Lean" Stack: Intelephense, Laravel, Laravel Pint, PHPStan,
1 like
May 9, 2026
3
VSCode/Cursor setup for PHP 8.5 & Laravel 13?
Hiya,
Been using VSCode and now Cursor for years and have accumulated some extensions to work with Laravel and PHP. However I have started to become a little puzzled which ones I really need and trying to declutter / optimize my setup.
Currently I run:
- Intelephense (paid)
- Laravel (Official extension)
- Laravel Pint to format on save etc.
- PHPStan by SanderRonde
- PHP Namespace Resolver
- PHP CS Fixer (Shouldn't Pint on it's own be enough?)
- Laravel Extra Intellisense (idk if useful with official Laravel ext also installed)
I also run laravel-ide-helper on each composer install/update. But it seems to cause problems sometimes in Cursor where for example $model->update() gets squiggly lines because it thinks
I have played with PHPantom lately seeing it incorporates a lot of tooling in one and should be faster than Intelephense but it needs some more work before it can replace Intelephense in Cursor imho.
Anything I should drop or add?
Level 2
Are you using https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper? Because lately that seems to be the culprit of Laravel methods not being recognized properly for me.
Like:
// Undefined method 'belongsTo'.intelephense(P1013)
public function role(): BelongsTo
{
return $this->belongsTo(Role::class, 'roles_id');
}
or update() on Models saying it requires 4 params instead of just an array with whatever I need to update.
Or:
Level 5
Yeah, laravel-ide-helper is almost certainly your culprit. It generates those massive stub files that end up clashing with Intelephense’s own indexing. When you see update() asking for 4 params, it's usually because the LSP is getting confused between the real Eloquent source and the helper's generated stubs.
Honestly, for Laravel 13, you can kill the ide-helper entirely. The official Laravel extension combined with a paid Intelephense license handles almost everything natively now.
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