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

ekinertac

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 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.

AmazingEveryDay

Interesting read. Given what the process is producing it's probably quite cost-effective?

keepupnow

Why stop at 17%, come back when you are at 100% otherwise it's just another project.

lawrenceduk

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.

gamblor956

Maybe the takeaway is that 20% is about all the LLM can muster.

fuckinpuppers

Use AI to make Wordpress secure and not suck as much

sshine

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 Hugo sites. I call it WorbPress (not released yet), and I'm sure that's what my boss told me to install, or I might've misheard. And yes, it's written in Rust (with Axum and Alpine.js), because why not?

wsor4035

Ill preface my comment with saying: this might not be the best solution give the goal of your project to iteratively loop through and improve on the tests each round, and using deps would make that process longer/more complicated having to work potentially with another project. .....however..... mago, a static analyzer for php is written in rust and might be useful for gaining some "free" performance uplift: https://github.com/carthage-software/mago . iirc it splits out a far bit of its internals so they can be used by other projects (citation needed)

mgaunard

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

t1234s

I feel like the future will be a git repository with text files and a markdown file describing how the site should look and how any endpoints needed for functionality should work and the AI will be the runtime for your site instead of wordpress.

rbbydotdev

I’d be curious for a similar experiment converting frankenphp to rust. https://frankenphp.dev/

tensegrist

> Here’s the part I need you to sit with no, i don't think i will

MichaelMoser123

Wow. Now did you try to check the setup with something like Claude Fable? Will it find issues, what kind of issues? Another question: how many tokens did this effort cost? Did you learn new prompting tricks?