Hacker News — 2026-07-05#

Top Story#

My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress What makes this project fascinating isn’t just an LLM writing a parser—it’s the author’s workflow. A developer who doesn’t know Rust used the official 22,000-file PHP test suite as an incorruptible oracle to grade the AI’s code generation, preventing the model from hallucinating success or “grading its own homework”. It now successfully renders a WordPress front page from a SQLite database, proving that leveraging hostile test suites as a build system actually scales to real-world codebases, even if the resulting engine is 55x slower than native PHP.