My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
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Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#2Author 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 realistic ceiling around 40-45% since the rest tests C extensions (GD, curl, intl, etc.) that are out of scope.
"Renders WordPress" means: fresh install completes into SQLite, the front page renders with real posts, a real theme and /wp-admin/ renders without issues. The REST API is untested, and it's currently ~55x slower than PHP on the front page (a bytecode VM is in progress, micro-benchmarks are already at 1-3x of PHP 8.5).
The scoreboard auto-generates into the repo after every run, whether the number went up or down.
Happy to answer anything.
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#3Interesting read. Given what the process is producing it's probably quite cost-effective?
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#4Why stop at 17%, come back when you are at 100% otherwise it's just another project.
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#5Is 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.
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#6Maybe the takeaway is that 20% is about all the LLM can muster.
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#7Author 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…
Will you answer questions yourself, or will you simply pass on what your LLM of choice writes for you?
Edit: On further inspection, the blog design, the blog build, the blog articles and even the anecdotes used in the articles are entirely Claude generated.
Stop being so lazy. Get Claude to do something interesting and use your own intellect to assess and challenge the work in your write up. Or the other way around. Inject some amount of human work, at least. Otherwise, what's the point in sharing?
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#8Author 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…
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Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#9Use AI to make Wordpress secure and not suck as much
Re: My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress
#10Author 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…
This is a pretty cool experiment. Thanks for sharing!