A 4-part series.
We lived in quiet and peaceful times in the PHP community about 11 months ago, in late 2025. We didn't have agents yet, we managed projects manually and we had our favorite frameworks and tools we used for years.
Then this weird package came to my attention, on Reddit, something written in Rust. Looked like a replacement for PHPStan. I thought it was AI slop (as most projects were popular for a month and then disappeared), so I ignored it.
Then in spring 2026, agents came. Mago was still there.
In the previous post we looked at how Rust's speed of static analysis opened the door for non-PHP languages to analyze PHP codebases.
What influence did it bring upon the PHP world? How can we - PHP devs - leverage it for our own profit?
We've established that we, PHP devs, can benefit from tooling written in a language we don't understand as well as we do PHP. How exactly?
The cost of a slow language is called cache. That's why Easy CS runs only on files changed since the last time it ran, Rector and PHPStan run only on files affected through the dependency tree since last time, and Pest has TIA do the same.
In faster languages like Golang or Rust, there is no need for cache.
