My own coding agent in 500 lines of PHP

"Autonomous coding agents" seem to be popping up everywhere lately. My curiosity got the best of me and I wondered if I could build one of my own using that old reliable language, PHP. Despite a few hiccups (mostly due to not being the best at prompting), I was able to successfully create something that runs in the background, listens for new GitHub issues, makes code changes, and opens PRs, all directed by calls to an LLM. Does it work great? Not really. Was it fun to put together? Definitely! If you're interested in how these tools work, it's never a bad idea to try and make a version of them yourself. 0:00 Intro 0:54 What's an "agent"? 1:49 Planning everything out 2:37 Building the agent 9:55 A simple test run 11:51 Some final thoughts Send me new video ideas and vote on what's coming next: https://suggest.gg/aschmelyun Follow me at   / aschmelyun   or https://bsky.app/profile/aschmelyun.com Join my newsletter, where I send out new information about twice a month in the PHP, JavaScript, and Docker realms: https://aschmelyun.substack.com