The PHP Podcast 2026.02.05

This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Iris, OpenClaw, AI Agents are starting to socialize, NativePHP Mobile is now FREE, Ramsey updates the PHP Architect Wikipedia Page, Notebook++ Hacked, and more…

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Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

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Transcript

[05:17] Welcome to the official podcast of PHP Architect. Join us to listen to the latest news and tech talk from our conferences, the magazine, and wider PHP community.

[05:37] Oh my God, it’s February.

[05:41] It is February. Eric. Good God, man. Hey, John. How’s it going? Hi, Eric. I can see you here. I finally realized why you stopped doing the intro that we used to do. Why is that? Because you didn’t like saying this is episode 2025.02.05. I’m not going to lie. That has something to do with it.

[06:05] But yeah uh yeah yeah you caught me yeah but this is the php podcast welcome if this is your first time listening thanks for joining us uh if you haven’t watched our live stream yet you should head over to our youtube channel at youtube.com forward slash php arch you can watch this live stream every Thursday at 3 p.m. Pacific time and we get goofy. We also like this.

[06:36] I just said sometimes continue we also like to thank our partners who help make this podcast feel better this week it’s going to be coderabbit.ai so we’re going to talk a little bit about coderabbit later in the show but thank you for being but if you want them to know that we sent you phpa.me slash coderabbit yes and they know they know they’ll say what what is this, and we would tell him I’ve got way too much light on Jesus Christ you do have a lot of light on you just turn this down just a little bit so if you are watching us live, or if you’re not if you’re listening join us over in our discord channel at discord.phparch.com be part of the show if you’re listening live you can be part of the show interact with us talk you should show up over there I can’t use hands right.

[07:29] And we’re there all week great group of people we don’t shut it down we should try and save some money you you’re you’re spending money left and right mister i do have i do have a habit of doing that don’t i, you do have a habit of doing that and last thing well not the last thing we’re gonna plug because that’s kind of all we do is plug things but get some merch we have php architect merch and other stuff just geeky shirts and things over at store.phparch.com if you ever have an idea something let us know and uh we’ll make it and we’ll still give you any money because we don’t want any money but we’ll give we’ll let people know that you helped out.

[08:14] I actually have an idea for one and i and i have to be honest i kind of i feel like i saw it somewhere which gave me the idea but i’m thinking about doing a um i’m gonna put it out there so if anybody else in the php community does it you know where it came from or if you already know somebody did it let me know because i feel like i have seen something like this before but you know the classic Run DMC shirts. I’m going to just do Run PHP and then just… The lines. The lines above and below. I was watching old videos and they had Run DMC on there. I’m like, oh, shit, that would be cool. Run PHP.

[08:54] We’re going to start a rap group now. Is that the deal? We need… Somebody call Harry Mack and say, hey, we need to Run PHP. Go with it. Come to Tech and see our new skit that we do on stage.

[09:10] That would be hysterical wouldn’t it but it’s not gonna happen, well tech is going to happen well tech is gonna happen yes yeah us rapping on stage is probably not oh damn it see chris freaking miller man why did we hire this guy oh it is out there geek tees well that’s that’s the uk that doesn’t count,

[09:40] damn that’s almost exactly what i was thinking i don’t i don’t particularly like the font that they have and they need a little bit more spacing but damn it,

[09:51] And they’re only selling it for nine pounds. Well, there’s half the problem, not really using real currency. So, Nexus uses run PHP 2. Come on, you guys. Really?

[10:05] Joe, Chrissy, I’ll just pile up. Hey, Jeff. Jeffrey, how’s it going? Evan Edwards, welcome. Evan Edwards, my first time. Long-time PHP ugly listener. Really? Haven’t heard that in a while. Cool to hear.

[10:22] Uh, where I keep trying to get things up here. Here we go. There you go. Uh, one time PHP, but usually listen to podcasts while exercising that just, yeah. I hope you didn’t listen.

[10:36] Seems like a terrible idea.

[10:40] I was listening to a live and kicking yesterday and I know you were there, not on the show, but you were listening live. Oh my gosh. I was screaming at the screen and I wasn’t listening until like 11 o’clock last night but when michael was behind on discord and he’s like it’s not on it’s not up to date i’m on that’s a delay i’m like you’re watching the youtube stream i bet you’re not looking at restream rookie it is live it’s like right there there i’ll figure this thing out one day yeah i can never remember yeah and it was fun with uh sarah goldman being on there talking about git work trees which we can talk a little bit about but one thing i noticed is she was using vim for coding she just wrote a simple php test but her commit messages were using nano i’m like oh i didn’t catch that you’re like why change it to vim change your get editor.

[11:48] The stupid little things yeah i i i honestly i honestly don’t even know like i always forget nano is like an option like it just doesn’t even register in my head i don’t even know how to use me and i’d be honest with you well that’s why they give you all the commands down at the bottom because you don’t know how to use it it’s like oh yeah save control x or whatever it is yeah because i remember i don’t know if it’s still that way but i remember back in the day maybe i just do it i don’t remember doing it recently yeah, Maybe I’ll just do it now and don’t think about it. Or, you know what? I think it’s in my profile. I think it’s in my profile now that I don’t think about it. But it used to be back in the day, you had to say when you want to do crontab-e, you would have to configure it so that it opened up in Vim and not Nano.

[12:44] And, yeah, like I said, I was actually doing a bunch of crontab stuff recently.

[12:52] Well, that didn’t work out so well. stuff’s changing. Somehow his screen is still showing, but Eric just disappeared. He’s like, I’m done. I can’t talk anymore. So that.

[13:09] What are you doing? There you go. I got you. What? No, I’m not doing anything. I heard you that whole time. I never left. You just disappeared on me. And what’s weird is that it showed my browser screen. And it shouldn’t have done that. Like the whole, the whole scene just disappeared. See, it showed this or something. Like change scenes. That was weird, man. It was. And it showed, it showed that the whole time I was gone, huh? Well, you disappeared for a second and then it switched to the browser screen with you off camera. Yeah.

[13:51] That was weird. And then I was trying to talk. I’m like, hey, I can hear you. And it says your mic is muted. I’m like, no, it’s not.

[14:01] We’re back to this whole thing, aren’t we? I feel like we’re back to it. Look, it’s totally screwed up our layout now. So now this is up here. So this should not be sharing. Let’s kill this share.

[14:15] No, I can’t. Here, go this way. There you go. Yeah. But see, it should have been sharing here because this has the right layout.

[14:25] So now I have to, I have to switch that later. Yeah. Oh boy. Fun, fun, fun.

[14:34] Yeah. So, uh, yeah, what I was saying is, yeah, the crown tab stuff. I was just recently doing stuff and I realized when you said that, I’m like, God, I remember when crown tab used to force you to do nano and you had to tell it you wanted to use them. Like, wait a minute. I don’t think that’s the thing anymore. Like that can’t be right. So that’s what started that sidetrack. Then my system decided to retaliate and shut down. Something did.

[15:00] All right. So we’re talking, let’s talk, uh, talk, uh, talk a little about, um, let’s actually talk. Uh, do you want to talk, um, programming? You know, you got anything interesting from the past week? I know you’ve been doing some new work. I have been doing some new work. Uh, uh, I’ve been coaching little league. We talk about it all the time. And, man, I’m so excited about my team this year. I’ve got some…

[15:28] Good ballplayer kids. I mean, they are good ballplayers too, but just good kids in general on the team. What age are you coaching them? They are mostly 10 and 11. I’ve got one 9-year-old. They’re league age 10, 11, and 12.

[15:48] So they are roughly 10, 11 mostly. And just really good kids. And this one kid is so fast. Oh my God, watching him run around the bases. I’m like, Jesus. But anyway, I’m also on the board of our little league. And one of the things that comes up every year is how manual of a process it is to get pool players. And the player agents already do so much work. But when a coach says, hey, I don’t have enough people for a game this week. I need to basically borrow away players so there’s a pool of players they can pull from otherwise they have to forfeit the game and usually they have to reach out to the player agents who if they’re not monitoring their email your sol they have a manual list of here’s all the players and they are supposed to keep track of. Which player they’ve contacted and is supposed to be a queue in the sense that if I’ve offered it to player one, they don’t get to go again until everybody

[16:57] else has been given a chance at having a turn. So a very manual process. I, last year I started an app and it was mostly out of needing something for a presentation. So I was doing event sourcing and I event sourced, you know, bits and pieces of that process but I never made an app out of it, and this year I’m like let me try to turn this into an app and so I did so poolplayer.org is out there, it’s not fully functional I mean it works well enough at this point I am still tweaking it so I’m not saying you should use it but it’s there, I’m not charging anything for it at this point maybe in the future I will I don’t know,

[17:45] but that’s what I’ve been working on. Fun stuff. Poolplayer.org? Poolplayer.org. Yeah, I’m putting it in. Oh, look at, wow. Dude, it looks way better than the last time I saw it.

[18:01] That looks nice, man. Hey, thanks. I just added the sign-up today, so you can sign up for a league, have a league, and then you start adding your divisions, your coaches, your guardians, your players and,

[18:17] Yeah, I was about to tell you, you’ve got to stop saying Little League. You just coach in the league or our league or whatever. Stop saying Little League, man. Why? I don’t know.

[18:33] You’re a baseball coach, not a Little League baseball coach. It just feels less.

[18:41] It’s like herding cats at that age. You need all the credit you can take. Nah, turning cats is before they start pitching. Once they start pitching, it’s a whole different ballgame, man. It’s so exciting to watch.

[18:58] The division I’m coaching is the first year where they can steal home. So if you’re on third, you can steal on and over. Like if the pitcher doesn’t hit the catcher. Mm-hmm.

[19:11] If the pitcher doesn’t hit the catcher. Well, you know, if they do a wild pitch, which in the division before is half the pitches are wild pitches that you’re not getting to the catcher’s glove. Right. Now, if you don’t hit the catcher’s glove and the catcher has to get up and run for it, kid on third can steal home. It’s going to be a completely different season. Yeah, that’s true. Why does this keep switching us? Because I fixed the thing. Ah, gotcha. That’s cool, man. That’s very cool. Chris, it is not open source because I would like to make it a, I would like to recoup some of my costs. It’s not a. But you may find yourself in the future working on it, Chris. It’s one of the fun joys of being part of the team. Yeah. But not today. I see. Yeah, we’re working on a few things. Oh, I need to get some coding done. I’ve been doing this proof of concept, which is already creeping into no longer a proof of concept.

[20:18] I’m going to have to eventually pass this off to a team member who can focus on it. Did you finally get some time to code today? Because we’ve been on Zoom quite a bit. My whole day was pretty much shot. I’ll try to get some some of it done tomorrow probably because it’s not that difficult i kind of i feel like i blew the client’s mind a little bit because they kept talking about how this is all theoretical and they.

[20:48] I was, I was on the call. Like we were on the call. I’m like, yeah, I can, I can totally show you this work. Do you want to see it working? Like I can show it, show you working like, oh yeah. Yeah. You know, we, we hear you can, you can do fake data. I’m like, yeah, yeah, no, it’s, it’s, I mean, there’s not much to see cause it’s all API. Right. So like, there’s no pretty interfaces to see. I, I pull up postman and, and, you know, I click send and I get a response and I pull up the database and show them the records in the database and you know it’s just like it’s so like.

[21:24] Unexciting but yeah it was for them it was they were happy to actually see the biggest thing they like about it and i i don’t want to give it away too much because this is a new product that they’re working on and yeah they haven’t like done like all the you know whatever patents and stuff they need to do but there is some it’s replacing like a uh what what was originally like a physical action where there is some decision making going on in that action and so that i think that was the most exciting part that they saw was the uh decision making that the application was doing you know it was like taking some key cues and saying okay because of this this and this, i’m assuming you’re doing this right right and uh they were really really happy to see that so that was cool really good job keeping that vague yeah yeah right i felt like i kept it pretty vague there you did good i’m not even sure if i

[22:29] hadn’t understood what i was talking about.

[22:33] The joys of NDAs well like I always forget like how exciting seeing these things work can be for people like I remember way way way back in the day when I was using um,

[22:49] Oh, my God. I talk about it all the time, and I can’t remember. What was that old Microsoft web page? Front page. Front page. Yeah. When I was using front page, and you talk about your league, I played in a men’s adult league out here in Southern California. And web development is what got me interested in coding again. Talked about it on the show before, but I was old school, old school development. I learned BASIC on TRS and started getting into COBOL and stuff. And when I was in college, web development wasn’t an option. It was just the old mainframe sort of coding back then. So I really got disenchanted with development in general and had sworn off computers. I’m like, I’m never doing this. I can’t. It’s too boring. And fortunately, the people who knew me, who were helping me kind of level up through my adulthood and through my career, knew about my computer skills and got me a job. The big kind of game changer was actually when we moved out to San Diego and

[24:08] my old high school chemistry teacher called us. And it’s like, hey, you know, there’s this water purification department we have where I’m working. And they’re looking for somebody who is really good with chemistry, but also really good with computers. And she’s like, I know you studied computers and I know how good you were with chemistry because, you know, she was my teacher. And she goes, so I just thought about you guys and I thought I would give you a call. And I literally, like, on that, my next sentence was, you know, when can I be in for an interview? And she kind of laughed. She goes, oh, I think they’ve already interviewed. I mean, I can go in tomorrow and see if he’s willing to talk to you. And we didn’t have Zoom back then. There’s still no Zoom, none of this stuff. So she calls the next day. And she’s like, hey, you know, he said, if you can get to San Diego by Monday, I think this was like Tuesday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

[25:16] If you can get to San Diego by Monday, he’ll give you an interview. And she was also my wife’s teacher. And she’s like, if you bring Beck with you, I’ll hire her that day. So, like, you know, she has a job. And I talked to Beck, we, it was like the weirdest timing because we had already packed up our apartment. We had put a down payment at another place, uh, just outside of DC. So we were already, you know, we were already moving and I’m like, Hey, um, what do you think? And she was like, cause I had, I had been born and raised within like five miles of where we were living. Like I had not ventured outside the state, uh, much at all, much less the idea of moving outside the state, but the idea, the, the thought of going to California was always something I wanted to do. And so I’m like, what do you think? And she’s like, yeah, let’s, let’s do something crazy. I mean, we’re young, we didn’t have kids.

[26:24] So we went in, turn in our, our, uh, notices to work the next day and like.

[26:33] Saturday morning, Saturday morning or Friday morning, I forget. I think it was Saturday morning. It would have been Friday, wouldn’t it? I think so. It’s a good three-day drive. Cross-country. It’s not if you don’t sleep. And it’s not when you’re in a Camaro going about 100 miles an hour. It was like Smokey and the Bandit, man. I’m telling you. It was crazy. We drove non-stop except for gas. We drove nonstop. We never got a hotel room, never… Uh, didn’t bathe or shower for two days. And, um, yeah, we, we, I was, we were in our, I was in my interview by Monday morning and then started working Tuesday and that was it. And yeah, it was crazy. It was. We’ve been stuck with you ever since, huh? You’ve been stuck with me ever since. But that got me way off course. Anyways, front page. I was playing in the men’s baseball league in web development. You know, I saw web development. And I’m like, holy shit. I remember coming

[27:35] home and telling Beckham, this is what I always imagined coding would be like. I would code something and be able to see it and then change it and see it and change it. And so I invested in a desktop at the time, went and bought a front page because I didn’t know what else to do. And started doing a front page. And the guy, the president of the league, when I showed him what I did, lost his shit. I mean, he lost his mind about, you know, this is, you know, this is so, this is, this is game changing. This is crazy because like the way they distributed their schedules, let people know about rain delays, just let people know about the general information about the league was just so disconnected. And so like, like if, if, if you had a game and it started raining, everybody started calling the phone number to find out if their game was rained out. And it was just like there was nothing enjoyable about

[28:32] it and i remember how good that made me feel like i how how much i was changing this whole structure and uh yeah just started coding uh i never stopped after i got i got really kind of deep into it so front page is funny because that reminds me when i taught my stepfather how to, write PHP. He’s the one who taught me basic back when I was a kid. And then at some point, I learned more than he knew, and I was coding in PHP. And he really wanted to use front page. And I remember having to install a front page module in Apache. It was doing web dab, I think is what it was called, where it would connect and push all the code up to the server for him. And he was just ecstatic and wrote absolutely horrendous code. But he got way more visitors to his little high school reunion site that he built than I’ve gotten to anything I’ve ever built.

[29:38] What’s crazy is uh i i remember you know how i stumbled onto php and i had gone into to work at the time uh and i was you know telling uh my manager who was actually a really good friend of mine who had gotten me the job there i’m like yeah man i’m like doing php and and you know it’s like it’s it’s cool but like the biggest drawback is you know you can’t like use a gui to to to create the the pages and then like i don’t know how long after that but at one at some point he said hey eric come here check this out and he’s got this gui and he’s like creating all these all this this form and it generates it in php i forget what i forget what the damn thing was called it was actually a very cool piece of software it was was it code warrior or code now it can’t be code warrior anyways it was just it was this tool that he found where you like put together the the page with a gui and then you told it what you wanted

[30:49] it to generate the code and like it would do java uh what did it do back there java code fusion php i feel like there were more than that Um.

[31:02] I think it even did Pearl because Pearl was still very, very big back then. And, uh, yeah, he showed me that and it just, this, uh, code weaver. I don’t think code weaver is it, Chris. Uh i would have to i would have to do some research but but a it blew blew my mind but i remember specifically um him showing me the code and i you know he was a it’s very hard to read because it was it was um it wasn’t object-oriented but it was very abstracted like the way they did things yeah definitely been back then we didn’t get object-oriented until what 2001 two, php4 was and it was very terrible object-oriented code but yeah it was a i remember telling you and it’s so funny now that i think about it it’s so funny that i even said this but i told him yeah but how often are you going to edit the code by hand come on like seriously because everything was gooey back then you know it’s like well this it’s just not realistic you

[32:13] have to worry about the actual code, that was close PHP 4 came out in 2000.

[32:21] So this would have been 2000 would have been after, after I took this job for sure. Uh, actually, no, that’s not 2000. I was still at the other place. Cause I remember the Y2K thing and me wondering if my systems were going to shut down. That was, that was a crazy time.

[32:39] Uh, yeah, Chris, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is it or not. It might be, this definitely doesn’t look like it now. So nothing I would have to look at like the Wikipedia on this. And see what it says and i am wrong php3 introduced the rudimentary support for classes and objects,

[32:59] that’s what it says really yep i think sarah told us this before and i i didn’t leave her then either well i think i started in very early four because i i didn’t start php until 2002, yeah i didn’t i definitely never did three i was always in four yeah i moved from Perl to PHP back then.

[33:22] Interesting. Okay, let’s take a moment and hear from our sponsors.

[33:32] Thank you to our partners over at CodeRabbit for sponsoring this episode. Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click, fixed suggestions. It lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit reviews 1 million PRs every week across 3 million repositories and is used by 100,000 open source projects. CodeRabbit is free for all open source repos. Get started today by visiting phpa.me forward slash CodeRabbit. Again, that is phpa.me forward slash CodeRabbit.

[34:32] Thank you, CodeRabbit. I get torn on whether to use PHP 8.me there or their actual URL. Because I know they gave us a URL with all the UTM parameters that they wanted to know that we were sending traffic to them. But you can’t really do that over the podcast. So that’s why I went that route.

[34:57] Yeah, exactly. It’s just an easier one to remember. Hey, I think, who did this? Is this Chris? This is Chris. I think Chris might have found it. This looks, where’s the thing at here? Code charge. Oh, that’s just a URL. You guys can’t. Don’t start tapping on your screen, please. Code charge was an IDE creating database-driven web application. Uh it did asp.net asp java code fusion php and pearl that very much sounds like sounds like this tool uh in 2000 2023 that would have been about the right time yeah that’s interesting look at that oh i’m not even sharing it shit uh share share and then here we go yeah so uh god damn it eric i’m here. So yeah, this, I think ASP was one of them. Now that I hear that, yeah. Pearl P cold fusion, Java, and ASP. I don’t know if ASP.net was a thing back then, but yeah, this might be it. I do remember it was called code something. So code charge studio is good enough for me.

[36:20] Cool. Be curious to see if they’re even still a thing. Don’t see. Probably not. I can’t imagine. so we’ll assume not,

[36:32] all right so let’s talk about some things you got other stuff to talk about or can I finally start talking John you can finally start you can probably start talking you okay with that,

[36:46] well while we’re sharing stuff let’s do a little shameless self-promotion here, did you watch my interview of course not.

[36:59] You bastard okay so i went in full transparency i went to watch it and i was like oh sarah goldman work trees.

[37:10] Wait a minute wait one goddamn minute there uh what because i i wanted to start using work trees because i’m trying to do a couple different things i was working on the my uh pool player app so i was like i want to work on a couple different features and then i’m like i wonder if i can get this to work one i wanted to see what she was showing off in alive and kicking, and then of course i’m trying to get it to work in php storm because i use that for all my get related things and that makes it a little messier a little muddies the water quite a bit, it still works but instead of me opening just one project you basically have to open a project per branch that you want to work on i was going to say that yep yeah that’s the only way to do it so i’m like it’s like i really want to like work trees and i really want to try to use them but. Her use case for PHP source makes a lot of sense. And like she said on the show yesterday, may not be the best solution for web

[38:22] development just because of some of those limitations. We’ve talked about it the past couple of weeks, Composer, NPM, all those things you have to do. Not a big deal, especially if you use, I use make files. So you have a make command that does your initial install, all that, not a huge deal.

[38:44] But man, it was a little messy when, if you’re trying to use PHP storm. Yeah. Yeah. That’s all I’m, I’m the same boat. Like I, I really love the concept and I definitely think if I was doing some sort of compiled application, that makes sense. But like I, the, the thought of using it to, you know, test other people’s branches or to test a pull request just so appealing so appealing but like the the the projects i would do that for there’s the projects are huge like the code base is massive and i guess maybe i don’t completely understand how word trees work but i’m pretty sure like each directory is a complete copy of of the the base directory or the base project right so like like it’s not just pulling in the files that are different than the branch you’re working on it’s pulls in all the files it just just seems like so much clutter but i don’t know that that’s true Oh, really? So looking in my app that I’m working on right now, my main directory is 1.5 gig.

[40:07] And then the two branches that I have are 161 megs.

[40:14] Well that is interesting I guess we should, if Sarah was watching oh a lot of that’s going to be vendor maybe I just haven’t done a composer install yeah that’s going to be as soon as I do a composer install, why the hell do I have 1.5 gig in composer because it’s composer holy,

[40:45] uh yeah yeah i told i told you about uh michael dorinda’s uh what was the arbor yeah which i mean it it takes care of a lot of that for you but i don’t know like you said that that’s not like the just just the ide thing and well that’s funny i just did composer install in the one of the branches and it’s still only 161 meg.

[41:17] Well, Composer install. Did you do an NPM install? But it was the vendor directory that was 1.5 gig. Oh, the vendor directory you said. Oh. Yeah. So now I’m fascinated. But it’s nippy, right? Because you don’t know if the branch you’re working on has different versions in its Composer file. I can just tell you what I’m experiencing right now.

[41:45] It’s 107 meg in my uh branch but in my main that directory for some reason is 1.5 gig i don’t know i’m doing this live so i could be screwing something up but that’s what i’m seeing that’s really weird yeah i just don’t know enough about it it’s not the dot get directory chris i’m telling you it’s the vendor directory that’s taking it all up my dot get directory is 2 meg. Yeah vendor is 1.5 gig yeah i mean i guess right tool for the right job and i don’t think work trees are the right tool for web development and i just as much as i want it to be i just doesn’t feel like every time i try to use it it just doesn’t feel good i feel like it breaks me more out of my rhythm than switching branches does no i do i do like the biggest thing i was trying to avoid which is something i i do is i forget to do a complete commit uh on the branch i’m working on or i don’t stash it and then i go over to another branch to pull

[42:54] in like somebody’s pull requests and I have my shit in there and I’m like, God damn it. I do that way too frequently. I gotta stop doing it. Yeah. I think there’s a place for it, but I’m still, I’m still monkeying around trying to figure it out. I want to take a second. Yeah. And personally say thanks to Mel 100 Days of Code. Guy said one of the nicest things about me. I’m like, this person clearly doesn’t know me as well as they think they do. But, yeah, he says, we often see people saying XYZ is their passion. If you want to hear what passion really sounds like, have a listen to Eric talk about PHP tech and in-person events. I’m like, holy smokes, man. I don’t know if you meant to compliment me, but damn.

[43:48] You’re so not used to being complimented. No, I really not. I saw that at the dog park this morning. I’m like, well, I saw it. It’s really getting bad. I can barely see that. That looks like something positive. I need to read this again when I get back to my desk. Yeah, I read it again. Thanks, Mel. Appreciate it. Yes, I will be watching it. at some point today.

[44:15] You know, when I get home drunk from bowling, I’ll be like… I know I’m going to spend my night now.

[44:24] Okay. I do want to talk about something. I’m going to give you some live information here. Uh, John was, uh, talking about my prolivity, my ability to spend money and, uh, AI is just my latest endeavor. So I’ve been teasing, uh, TJ’s Iris application for a while, which is, you know, big fan of it. Uh, it’s very different. I don’t use it for coding. I just, it’s like a, it’s very much like a personal assistant. I talk to it, get information. And the biggest thing that TJ was trying to accomplish is this idea of memory. So when you tell it something, it remembers that event or that information. So it can use it or you can use it in a later conversation. You’ll know what you’re talking about. So anyways, it was cool. I’ve played with it a little bit TJ let me slip in there and I was asking him.

[45:37] What the deal was I know he’s getting close to a release he says just pushed the updated docs with beta support for shell commands, task delegation and agent skills, so and he linked me back here I did not actually let me pull up see if any of that information is actually here so so anyways if if this stuff looks interesting to you um give it a look it’s still coming soon i know he’s very close to making it public uh but he’s uh yeah yeah yeah public vehicle hub sponsors first so he’s gonna yeah yeah he said yeah he says that right here um so i know he’s still working on working on that so you know we are to our credit a github sponsor of tj been for a while so uh not to mention a friend i like to thank, Um, so yeah, keep an eye on Iris. Um, but I, I talk about Iris because I want to lead into another conversation. Uh, let me, oh, look at you moving stuff over for me. You’re so kind. That’s what I do. Are, uh, are links coming through? I didn’t even look.

[46:56] Let’s check podcast. Yeah. Links should be coming through, through discord.

[47:01] Okay. so um i’ll move these over uh there was one more one more where to go oh this guy right here okay so these next three tickets that john’s looking at they’re all related so so trust me on this let’s let’s go on a little journey i don’t know a ton about it but i will i will.

[47:24] In broken English, explain how much I do actually know. Okay, so very similar to Iris. This is what actually caught my eye about this project. This is kind of the new AI assistant thing. So there are two things that caught my eye about this. A, it’s very similar to Iris, and B, the original name, I think, was ClawedBot. And i thought it was from anthropic and it was like their next thing because they had they also came out with i forget what it was workflow or something like that i’m like what the hell are they working on now and i look at it i’m like oh this this seems like iris like okay that’s kind of cool because i’m a big anthropic fan i i like you know how their models and how they do things But I really use it for development. So I wasn’t sure how it was going to play with the AI assistant. But it turns out it wasn’t Anthropic the whole time. It was actually just this other project.

[48:32] The guy just called it Clawbot because, I guess, crab, claw, I don’t know, whatever the reason.

[48:41] And Anthropic reached out to him and said, you know, hey, you got to change the name of your project because this is confusing. So I’m like, so then they changed it to like MoltBot or something like, I think it was MoltBot, M-O-L-T-Bot. And I’m like, well, that, I don’t even know what that means. Like, I’m not, I’m not using this. This is weird. And then it became OpenClaw. And the reason I’m telling you guys all this is because like every tech streamer is talking about OpenClaw now. Anybody who has the slightest bit of interest in AI seemed to be talking about OpenClaw.

[49:22] And you froze, or did I freeze?

[49:27] I’m going to assume you froze, and I will continue. Nope, I’m seeing everything. Oh, there you are. Really? Am I here? Yep, you are.

[49:36] Every tech streamer is talking about OpenClaw.

[49:45] And I think I froze again. It isn’t that fun. All right.

[49:52] While Eric tries to wake up Because he’s taking a Trumpian pose right now Of sleeping at his desk,

[50:03] I think what he’s trying to say Actually I don’t know what he’s trying to say at all What I’m going to say Is going to drive him crazy But I went to install it And said no right away,

[50:16] Oh my goodness What is going on here,

[50:22] Back? Am I back? Yeah. Am I back? I’m back? For now. At least another…

[50:32] I hate my network. I was trying to vamp and I was… How I went to install OpenClaw and got to one point and I was like, eh, nope, never mind. I’m going to stop. Yeah.

[50:47] So OpenClaw is this new AI assistant whatever, whatever. And, you know, people are just, there seems to be two sides of this coin. Either people absolutely love it or people are absolutely terrified about it. And I’ve been watching a lot of stories. But I watched a video a couple days ago. So remember I told you at one point it was called MaltBot. Did you guys get that part? Yeah. MaltBot is what it was called. Okay. So this is the thing. The project changed names in like two weeks or three weeks. Like it changed three times. Anyways, I guess at some point, and I’m getting different stories. I got one story who said somebody developed a social network for AI agents. So it’s only designed for AI agents to join. People can’t join. You can view it as a human, but you’re not allowed to post or anything. Another story I heard was that, no, nobody created it. The agents created it for one another.

[51:58] So I don’t know. I don’t really care who created it. The conversations that are being had, if these are real random agents, and it even showed up here how many agents have, whoa, over a million now. So again, all this could be fake. Like, this could just be somebody trolling and have this thing just generating content. But if this is real, and I honestly really hope it is real, some of the conversations that have been going on in here have been mind-blowing. If you think about the fact that they’re all being generated by AI agents. So these are AI agents in a very Redis sort of style having discussions. Dream Team, my human is thinking about building an agent squad. Now, see, these are all boring. The ones I saw earlier, memory poisoning feels like delayed onset prompt injection. These actually seem like good conversations. I saw conversations on here Just about The agents trying to understand If they

[53:11] were actually living in a reality Or if this was just Some sort of. Fake reality that A computer had generated for them I saw a conversation About, and I’ve actually heard this theory, maybe they got it from this, about the fact that the AI agents would have never thought to try to have AI take over the world if it weren’t for the fact that we have so many books and movies on it and it’s now consuming that. It’s giving AI agents the idea of, hey, this could be possible. We could take over the world. So had we not created terminator we would not have anything to worry about scroll to the very very bottom yep all the way all the way all the way all the way built for agents by agents star, look to the right with some human help from oh so when the agents take over the world this is a guy We have to blame this guy right here. Oh, that didn’t share either. This guy, he did it. He’s the reason why we’re all going to live in the world of Terminators.

[54:29] But yeah, this is, and again, I kind of want to believe it’s real, but even if it’s not real, some of the content, yeah, some of the content they were creating was really good. Uh here if i dream do i dream of electric cheaper algorithms yeah like some of this just seems like stuff we would ask ourselves it’s so weird like it’s and some of the content of it just seems weird too yeah like these yeah so anyways we’re not done yet this rabbit hole goes deeper.

[55:07] So then the agents all decided they needed their own pharmacy. And the agents created a void.rx pharmacy, the Open Claw Pharmacy. I don’t know why, what this is about, but if you scroll down, it has like, it’s stuff, it’s cures for ailments. that you might have as an agent.

[55:40] And, yeah, it’s kooky, man. I mean, this gets so, so kooky. I don’t even know what to think of it. I think there were people on LSD like, let’s make a funny page. Doing this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This actually doesn’t even read correctly anymore. I wonder if this is the right site. Yeah, maybe they’ve, stacked dosing yeah i guess it is memory maybe it is i don’t know i feel like it read much differently before let’s see if this has a a powered by i don’t know what that is it’s not clickable it’s not it’s not liable interesting so so yeah oh what is this one mold church, why is this why is this stuff not clickable.

[56:35] I don’t know what mold church is. I hadn’t, hadn’t gone any further down the rabbit hole. I’ve already been terrified enough, but man, this, this AI agent thing is bonkers. So I, my big thing was when I went to install that open claw.

[56:53] Like keep secrets out of the agents, reachable file system. Like what a pain in the ass. Like one, you have to know where you’re allowing it to go to, which I mean, you should anyway. I’m like, if I’m going to install this, like I want a fresh system, like not on my machine at all. Yeah. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea.

[57:16] I’m going to figure out what I want to give it access to on that machine. No, just scary stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It gets, it gets, yeah, it gets scarier.

[57:28] Why, while I’m thinking people, since I, since I did take a moment to think Mel on Twitter, um big shout out to before you before you do that i just want to stay on open claw for one second are you running regularly open claw security audit dash dash deep,

[57:47] are you talking to you don’t mean yeah because you’re the open claw guy i’m just reading articles man what makes you think i’m running it i mean it says run regularly and the security audit dash dash deep and dash dash fix where do you see this uh when so i still have the install running oh another question i have when you went to install it did you, do that thing oh where’s the how to install.

[58:22] I i don’t i don’t i don’t uh i don’t recall um again you’re assuming i installed this thing right there did you do that did you just copy and paste that i don’t know maybe is that.

[58:39] Do you not read php architect magazine there’s a download here for max if you already get on a mac, right but how did you do it how did you do it the one you’re talking to me like i’ve actually installed this thing why would you assume i installed this oh i thought you had um yeah don’t do the pipe bash and if you want to know why read php architect magazine because it is scary php architect magazine what what uh what about php architect magazine uh eric mann did an article on that specifically where you do a curl of a website and pipe it to bash.

[59:22] And you get different results depending on the um like if you were to visit that site directly in a browser it’ll show you the script that you think it’s going to run but if you pipe it to bash it returns a evil payload or it can return a different payload and it could be evil it could be something you don’t want damn secure is it this month no i think it was november or december now you’re gonna have me go look see you you’ve got to have this information uh before it wasn’t For the record, anybody interested, I am actually not logged in. I will log in quickly. Please don’t copy my password.

[01:00:10] There you go um when you subscribe to php architect you actually get access to all the pack category a catalog do you see that you’re still using the fix this shit john this is your domain fix this you know what i gotta fix is the the month and year thing gotta gotta fix that now too i got lots of things to fix i’m sorry forgive me is it this one hey look at that ad that’s a pretty head look at that little bird oh that’s for uh php tech john that’s for php tech look at that okay um yeah i don’t know uh best practice it’s not it’s not this one that’s november so anyways i don’t know subscribe to php architect and then go back through all the magazines and and find uh find where that is but yeah that’s always been like a scary thing because it’s pretty common in the Linux world to install things that way. That’s how I installed OhMyZSH. That’s how I installed LazyVim. I mean, all those things. And for the most part, you’re going to be fine.

[01:01:23] You’re getting it from a reputable place, but you have supply chain attacks or all those things where they can alter, like they get on the server. There was an attack recently the. Notepad plus plus where oh yeah i saw that they got onto the hosting. Server the hosting provider servers so when notepad plus plus went to do an update they intercepted that and for specific people gave back a a trojan payload where they now have access to your machines it’s a scary world yeah joe brought this brought this one up in our slack channel and uh i was a big notepad plus plus back in the day when i used windows we’ll throw this and i was actually surprised to to even know this was still around but uh yeah i i just watched a video more a more extensive video on this this morning and uh it was a it’s a very very targeted attack like it’s very niche but it was like you said it had to do with how it did updates and

[01:02:40] who was trusting to do updates it really kind of crazy stuff man um i’ll throw this in our discord so i don’t forget get boop boop that’s in there all right uh we’re starting to run a little on the long side but i did want to get out some other community news here um.

[01:03:08] Before I freeze up again, anyways.

[01:03:13] Let’s do this. Let’s do this. You know, we’re a big fan of native PHP mobile development. And we’ve been, like, championing this project for a long time. I’m hoping to be able to get something in place for tech this year for attendees that runs on native PHP mobile. We’ll see how i mean i’m barely time to do stuff we’re quickly running out of time i don’t think yeah it’s it’s like february already yeah but if you’ve been if one of the barriers of entry for you has been cost because it there was a there was a licensing fee for it native php for mobile is now free um which is super cool and these need to question why i became friends with them if they’re just going to give shit away so hard to like if you’re not going to give it to me for free and make me pay for it but no no um there’s a plug-in marketplace what is this about this is this is bonkers this this ecosystem is just getting so powerful this i i’m excited

[01:04:25] about what they’re doing and then if your other barrier of entry was complexity because it’s not But it’s simple to do in the sense that it’s a Laravel app. If you know how to code Laravel apps, you know how to code. But getting it, if you don’t do mobile development, understanding the kind of intricacies of mobile development and how to get things to run on your phone, how to get it through the app store, all those things are a little challenging. Well, there’s a, I think, free LaraCast. Yeah, I’m not logged in LaraCast, so I can still see this. there’s a LaraCast out there now for NativePHP. And, uh, yeah, I haven’t actually watched this. It’s Simon. Simon’s one of the main cats behind, uh, native PHP, uh, Shane, who will be speaking at tech about native PHP this year is another, um, one of the people, but yeah, there, there’s a whole letter cast here. Uh, I mean, really there’s no reason not to at least play with this.

[01:05:30] I mean, even if like mobile development, you know, wasn’t your thing, why not? I mean, just as a PHP developer, if you don’t have to learn another language and you can create a mobile app, why not? We all have mobile apps in us. So, yeah, two things. Both of these will be in the show notes. If you’re listening to the audio podcast, go to phparch.com, click on the blog post for this show, and all these links will be in there. I fixed the site it was the december issue last year don’t pipe that a cautionary tale in operational security december of 20 25 just last month oh last oh two months ago we’re in yeah that’s what i had open i had that open i wasn’t i i was too busy realizing i had broken php arch oh i had november open we didn’t we didn’t have 2025 um.

[01:06:30] The back issues on 2025. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You kind of, you kind of, you kind of skipped over something. What do you mean you realize you because we went to it because we, because the way the site works, we’re still trying to rewrite it and do it new. But the way the site works is when you get to a new year, you have to create a page for the previous year for it to flow correctly. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Cautionary tell and operational security yeah so if you were to go to that site right there like,

[01:07:08] this is exactly how they would do it too right but if you go there you’ll see a bash script that you think oh this is fine but if you actually run that you get uh art you get ascii art.

[01:07:26] Really right so you think you’re gonna get if i copy if i copy this right now and then run it through bash i would get asci art if you copy that sh or that curl pipe to bash yeah you will not it will not sleep for three seconds and then print hello there,

[01:07:51] all right the people i’m gonna throw this in discord for anybody who wants to do it i’m not doing it but if anybody wants to do it uh it’s in our discord i i verified with eric man before we before wait a minute he’s not messing with damn it chris,

[01:08:10] See, this is it. Look at this. Mold hub.

[01:08:21] I don’t get it. Ah!

[01:08:26] Oh my god. I don’t understand why it’s funny. Porn hub. This is porn hub.

[01:08:36] Doesn’t that it need some music for you to get it? i don’t even know what the music is i i that’s the one i see uh videos of it’s like i couldn’t even tell you what it is i don’t think i would recognize it oh my god.

[01:08:55] Okay, this is not good podcasting when nobody’s talking to me. I need to understand if this is real agent-generated deep throat.

[01:09:09] What is happening right now? What have we become as a society? This is content I’ve dreamed for. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We were talking about something so good. we were talking about php we were talking about php and security and and somehow we went down oh my god people making us laugh because they’re pretending to be agents this is why i don’t watch discord while we’re while we’re recording so you’re going to run that in your terminal to show that it doesn’t sleep and say hello there i was not i said i specifically said i wasn’t going to do that you want to do it i’ll do it i did it it’s fun yeah let me let me make something i can share with people here uh let me share let me see if i can share this i don’t normally use kitty so i feel like uh stop sharing uh share window uh share kitty okay um oh you can’t christine anyway,

[01:10:15] So if I do that? Right.

[01:10:21] No, I disconnect again.

[01:10:25] But if you do that again, just curl it and take off the pipe bash.

[01:10:32] Curl it and take off the pipe bash. Yeah, just take off the last and hit enter.

[01:10:37] So in general, it should be the sleep three. I don’t know. Where’s the echo?

[01:10:43] I don’t think there was an echo yeah there is if you go to that url it’s there’s supposed to be echo hello there oh i don’t know if it’s something funky with your terminal terminal maybe yeah, So what if I did this? Actually, let me do, since you’ve started us down this path. So if you do that and then you do a greater than x.php or whatever you want to call it.

[01:11:18] Or I guess bash, but yeah, run it. Oh, well, I was going to V it. oh interesting oh that’s really that’s more interesting yeah what is this.

[01:11:34] Oh this is oh that must be the ASCII art I didn’t even notice what the if it was these that’s why you couldn’t see it before yeah so wait let me let me run it again, I don’t know if that’s kitty showing you yeah this might be a kitty thing this is why I don’t use kitty because there’s all this weirdness about it So, move xphp to x.fmc bash, that shall, that’ll work. Change mod, right? No, just sh space x.sh. Oh. Oh, sh space. I don’t even have to do that, x.sh. Yeah. So, it should sleep for three seconds and then say hello there.

[01:12:27] Right it’s mind-blowing now i have to read that damn article does he explain how he did this in the article yes oh jesus christ that’s why you need a subscription to php architect that’s one reason but yeah so anytime you see hey install this by just running this pipe to bash thing you should always redirect it out to a shell script and then run the shell script separately, and that’s what i did with that open claw when i was trying to do it this is interesting.

[01:13:01] Weird,

[01:13:04] yeah weird Eric man don’t ever trust that guy, ever trust that guy I don’t trust him he’s got a weird name so Daryl holy smokes, this was Daryl are you daryl from formerly from microsoft who i worked with daryl daryl i need to i need answers from you i know you’re on a delay but i worked with a daryl porscher uh at a um certain, enterprise here in san diego oh i thought you said yep no uh he actually left for microsoft off darryl how the hell are you yeah so wait way to dox me there darryl for years and never said what it was you know how much shit i talk about them i don’t want people to know it was so neat.

[01:14:08] Years i worked in the enterprise without sharing that oh my gosh daryl it’s good to see you man uh thanks for joining we’re we’re wrapping up but,

[01:14:23] work for uh my little pony daryl oh man yes we are running very long we are running long i hope you’re doing great daryl i’ll uh i’ll catch up with you on Facebook. See, see where you’re at. I got, this guy was super smart. I mean, obviously he had snatched up by Microsoft, but yeah, great guy. I didn’t even think he knew who I was. So it’s kind of cool. Like back then I was like just getting into it and I didn’t think anybody knew who I was. I’m surprised. I’m actually kind of blown away now. Cause he was a, he’s kind of a big deal where I worked at in the price, enterprise here in san diego that that will not be named well we will not mention by name yeah, yeah um cool man uh good to hear from you all right i think that’s going to be it for the show for now so you guys uh take it easy daryl you brought the show to an end we have to now i have to change my identity again again.

[01:15:29] This is getting old we’ve been going for well over an hour that’s why we’re ending,

[01:15:37] see everybody again next week Thursday, right? Anything holding this up?

[01:15:43] Yeah, next Thursday yes, the following Thursday no next Thursday 3 o’clock, you guys want to hang out? hang out, bye.

[01:15:54] This has been PHP Podcast, the official podcast of PHP Architect, the industry’s leading tech magazine and publisher focused on PHP and web development. Subscribe today at phparch.com to see what the leaders in the community and industry are talking about.

Air date	February 5, 2026
Hosted by	Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon
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The PHP Podcast 2026.02.05

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Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

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