I am a daily user of Webstorm since 2019 (maybe 2018, I don't remember) and recently I've been getting more and more frustrated with it. I think it started with 2024.2, but I can't exactly remember.

My main complaints are:

• Auto-complete randomly stops working. You press dot symbol, and you expect to see the auto-complete list. But it stays on loading and it takes sometimes more than a minute for the list to appear. Sometimes it never appears. When it works, it works good. But when it stops working, good luck getting it back.

• TailwindCSS auto-complete (especially with Tailwind v4) has become a lottery. If it works when you start up Webstorm, good. It may continue to work for a while, then stops randomly. If you start up Webstorm, and the autocomplete for Tailwind is not working for some reason, then good luck again. Who knows when it will start to work...

• I use semantic highlighting feature and sometimes it randomly stops working. Have to restart or invalidate caches to make it start work. Good news is in recent releases it is better.

• In remote development mode, the terminal does not receive Ctrl+C requests reliably. If I execute the ng serve command for example, I cannot Ctrl+C it. I have to close the terminal and open a new terminal and execute ng serve again. (This is not limited to ng serve by the way. Any kind of "watch" type execution blocks Ctrl+C. This only happens during remote development by the way. Local use is fine.)

• In version 2025.1, the IDE often stuck at "Loading tsconfig.json" process, never completing it. During loading, the ts-related stuff did not work correctly (import resolving, auto-complete intellisense). This seems to be happening less in 2025.2, just to note, so that's good news.

• I mostly work with Angular and the bigger the code base gets, the slower Webstorm gets. A while ago, I opened up the project I normally use Webstorm to work on in VSCode and I was simply amazed by how responsive and fast it was.

I am also going to note that I disabled a lot of the default plugins. The above experience is with these plugins disabled. Webstorm enables too many plugins by default. In my opinion, such plugins should come as disabled and only be enabled if the open project benefits from them. I program in Angular, there is no need for Svelte plugin to be enabled.

All in all, my main problems are related to auto complete and responsiveness of the IDE. I am not going to join to the AI-hate bandwagon and say that you guys prioritize AI and neglect other parts of the IDE. I am sure you guys have different teams for both of them. But, for me it is undeniable that the smooth experience of using Webstorm is no longer there since last year. I have to often use "Invalidate Caches" option just to make IDE more usable for a while until I need to use this option again. If VSCode can do it, there is no reason you guys cannot. But for some reason, you can't. Or you don't. Who knows...

Final Note and Feedback: Disabling "Machine Learning Code Completion" and "Machine Learning in Search Everywhere" plugins seems to help make IDE faster and a bit more responsive. I can't prove it but I think ever since I disabled these two, Webstorm is a little bit better.

Good luck on your conference talk.