A non-Rust-developer used AI to build a PHP engine from scratch—17% of PHP-src tests pass and WordPress renders

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

The author, who doesn't know Rust, built a PHP engine called Phargo by having Claude write all the code while they only said 'looks good, continue' or 'that regressed, look again.' The project uses PHP's 22,000-test suite as an oracle—currently passing 3,844 (17.4%). A CRLF normalization bug in the harness silently failed hundreds of tests for weeks. The suite exposed silently broken features like clone, unset, and trim's charlist argument. A generator test once hard-rebooted the machine, leading to a 6 GiB memory cap and step limits. The engine eventually served a 26 KB WordPress front page. The post doesn't disclose the specific model version or total cost.

Why it matters: First-person experiment with hard numbers (17.4% pass rate, WordPress rendering), not marketing fluff. All three HKR axes hit. Deduction: early-stage project, 17% is far from production-ready; the post doesn't deliver a full failure catalog. 78, not 85, because there's no new ...