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My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

ekinertac.com

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Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#51

Post by sshine »

techscruggs wrote: post #34
sshine wrote: post #13

My boss asked me to set up a WordPress for a product landing page. I naturally won't do this; it's no more than a couple of weeks ago that some SQL injection landed in the search query function of this monstrosity. WordPress always was and always will be terrible. So I set up the landing page with a Hugo static site, and I've been vibe-coding a WordPress-like dashboard that operates on git repositories containing Hug…

Let me make sure I am hearing you right. 1) The person you report to asked you to accomplish a discrete task 2) of standing up one of the most common websites on the planet 3) and your response was to begin building your own custom CMS? I know I am removing the train of thought that led you down this path, but is there anything I just said that is factually false?

I’ll try to tell the story in a more responsible way: My boss asked me to install a WordPress, to which I advised against it; while it’s easy to set up, it doesn’t align with our tech stack (his main team won’t be able to support it easily, woohoo army of juniors!), and the convenience of a quick start is outweighed by having a thing that needs CVE patching when, guess what never got hacked: pure, static HTML.

Since my wife had asked me twice the same week to set up a website with a design mock she’d sent me, I thought: what’s holding me back in both cases from giving them a Claude Design’ed Hugo theme is that they need to edit Markdown on their filesystem and run terminal commands.

So I picked an item out of my infinite backlog, which was very well-defined: a web dashboard that acts as the equivalent of the WordPress admin page that lets you manage a Hugo static site, use a rich editor on top of Markdown, and commit to git instead of a database. I spent the better part of a weekend making this, with my wife as the customer, and when it got good enough, I presented it to my boss. He was happy with the choice, but mostly because of the vibed design, he ultimately didn’t care about the technology.

When someone wants “a WordPress” they’re asking for convenience of an easily updated website.

You don’t have to actually give them a WordPress.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#52

Post by sshine »

igetspam wrote: post #49
techscruggs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me make sure I am hearing you right. 1) The person you report to asked you to accomplish a discrete task 2) of standing up one of the most common websites on the planet 3) and your response was to begin building your own custom CMS? I know I am removing the train of thought that led you down this path, but is there anything I just said that is factually false?

AI has helped us all lose the plot because now we don’t just know better than everyone else, we can prove it by project managing our better versions of the same things. What I find really great is that we’re only a prompt or two away from proper docs for these novel solutions but we still don’t make them and if we do, we definitely don’t read them first.

I’ll say “proper docs” has shifted for me for two reasons

I used to insist on commenting code richly, so I could better read it. But comments lie, while code is truth. Read the code, that’s what it does.

With AI, the cognitive overhead of getting a human-worded explanation of what’s true, is one prompt away and is never a stale leftover.

So the purpose of docs: Specs for implementing and getting an architectural overview, and API documentation for exploring the interface of something new.

What I find great is that people still don’t test their code when it became practically free to do so.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#53

Post by sshine »

kmoser wrote: post #32
sshine wrote: post #13

My boss asked me to set up a WordPress for a product landing page. I naturally won't do this; it's no more than a couple of weeks ago that some SQL injection landed in the search query function of this monstrosity. WordPress always was and always will be terrible. So I set up the landing page with a Hugo static site, and I've been vibe-coding a WordPress-like dashboard that operates on git repositories containing Hug…

Just to clarify: you think your vibecoded dashboard is more secure than WordPress? Not saying you're wrong, just wondering why you think you're right. Are you auditing the generated code, or is it a giant yolo?

How do you hack a static HTML page?

The point is that most WordPress pages don’t warrant the dynamic code execution on every page load.

When you use a static site generator and make content creation convenient behind the scenes, you move the entire attack surface to, in my case, nginx, the load balancer, and OpenSSL.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#54

Post by dzhiurgis »

hoppp wrote: post #26
mgaunard wrote: post #25

Why is the AI only able to reach 17%? Surely it can just keep iterating until it implements the full test suite?

Money probably. This is a cash burn project.

I suspect it cost less than $100 using chinese models.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#55

Post by sshine »

fastily wrote: post #47
kmoser wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify: you think your vibecoded dashboard is more secure than WordPress? Not saying you're wrong, just wondering why you think you're right. Are you auditing the generated code, or is it a giant yolo?

I’m reasonably certain GP is (humorously) trolling us

Thank you.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#56

Post by sshine »

brailsafe wrote: post #31
sshine wrote: post #13

My boss asked me to set up a WordPress for a product landing page. I naturally won't do this; it's no more than a couple of weeks ago that some SQL injection landed in the search query function of this monstrosity. WordPress always was and always will be terrible. So I set up the landing page with a Hugo static site, and I've been vibe-coding a WordPress-like dashboard that operates on git repositories containing Hug…

> because why not? I'm not certain, but it seems like you're not being entirely serious here, however.. If you aren't joking, or for other people in this position, I'd first wonder if the landing page required a search function that would hypothetically be subject to the vulnerability, then I'd wonder about what the normal nature of your business is and how much latitude you personally have in the allocation of billa…

I get what’s you’re saying, and if I couldn’t justify making the best alternative I can imagine in my free time, because I’ve wanted it for a long time, I’d install “a CMS” (not WordPress).

> If there's a question about why money was spent on implementing a bunch of stuff nobody knows for a reason nobody cares about, especially for a very short-lived thing like a landing page, then it's a sticky situation if the answer is basically novelty.

The economy behind a decision like is this: alternative SaaS website builders are $20-60/mo./seat. We’ve historically paid $720/mo. for the ability to edit a single website that doesn’t look great but is dead simple to modify.

So if I can make something that scales up to any amount of sites and any amount of editors with ~10 hours on landing the design (which isn’t included in “a WordPress” either way), at ~$700, then I can justify making ten sites per year at the cost of our first.

Or more realistically: The total operating cost of the current website gives me 125 hours in a year to make something better.

Then the question is not “Can I make something better?” (Yes.) Or “Is it affordable to make something from scratch?” (It is.) But rather: Could I make more money doing something else? (I could halve the Azure budget in less than a month by optimizing and cleaning up.)

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#57

Post by ekinertac »

pluc wrote: post #14
ekinertac wrote: post #2

Author here. To be upfront about what this is: I'm not a Rust developer or a PHP internals person. This is an experiment in whether the "point the AI at the original project's test suite" methodology (the way Bun was driven against real-world suites) holds up when the human can't review the code. The oracle is php-src's own .phpt corpus, ~22k tests I didn't write. Current honest score: 3,844 passing (17.4%), with a r…

Compare with FrankenPHP?

I'm not there yet but I'll run the benchmarks against FrankenPHP and include it in the project when we get at least %60 test parity.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#58

Post by ekinertac »

hoppp wrote: post #26
mgaunard wrote: post #25

Why is the AI only able to reach 17%? Surely it can just keep iterating until it implements the full test suite?

Money probably. This is a cash burn project.

it's not that expensive actually. been working on this about a month with my 20x Max Claude subscription while I'm working on other projects as well.

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#59

Post by ekinertac »

UncleEntity wrote: post #48
lawrenceduk wrote: post #5

Is it astonishing you got to 17% with some vibe code? Sure. But most of the stuff I’ve vibe coded this year has been astonishing by 2025’s standards. If you got 100% I’d be genuinely blown away.

What I suspect is this 17% is the exact sub-set it needed to hack together to make the goal (running some example website) a reality as this is what those dodgy weasels do if you let them. Then you get to spend 200x the time to fill in the rest of the "speculative features deferred due to no real consumer" on top of whatever dodgy system they made up, which is usually whatever is easiest/closest to the literature ins…

[dead]

Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

#60

Post by ekinertac »

mgaunard wrote: post #25

Why is the AI only able to reach 17%? Surely it can just keep iterating until it implements the full test suite?

its still iterating, 17% is just where the counter is today. three weeks ago it was at 10%, two weeks ago 13.8%. i didnt post this as a final result, i posted becuase wp-admin rendering surprised me.

but no, it cant reach 100%. around 55-60% of the suite tests C extensions, gd, curl, soap, intl, mysqli, ffi, sockets etc. passing those would mean writing all those extensions from scratch too (libcurl, ICU, an image library...) which is a completely different project. the realistic ceiling for a from scratch engine is around 40-45% and thats the number im climbing towards.

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