Dev Null Dev
Written on 2026-10-20Join over 14k subscribers on my mailing list. I write about PHP news, share programming content from across the web, keep you up to date about what's happening on this blog, my work on Tempest, and more.
You can subscribe by sending an email to brendt@stitcher.io.
Hi
On Thursday, I walked into a studio together with Nuno, Matthieu, Pauline, and Rui; where we livestreamed for two days building a social media platform. The original goal was to show off PHP, PhpStorm, and Air.
We're Tuesday now, there are 8000 people on the platform, there are over 500 pull requests, we're going live on Product Hunt in less than an hour. I still need to catch up myself to understand what's going on 😅
There is so much to tell, and it'll probably take a bit longer to sort my thoughts, but I do want to share some initial takeaways.
- PHP remains a solid choice for web app development. We're running /dev/null (that's the name, by the way) on Laravel Cloud, it's Laravel in the backend, React in the frontend, postgres as the database. We're seeing a good amount of traffic, and PHP holds up just fine. Also, it was super easy to have something in production in less than 48 hours. All that to say: PHP is great.
- Yes, we used AI, but we were still in charge. There is no way non-programmers could have pulled this off, no matter how much AI they had. Vibe coding? Yes, but guided by trained professionals.
- Open source is incredibly powerful. We're over 500 pull requests of like-minded people who want to help. There's a pretty big backlog to work through still, but it's amazing when the community comes together. As far as I know it's the first social platform that not only encourages interaction through the platform itself, but also through coding together on actual platform features. It's something that sets /dev/null truly apart.
- PhpStorm + Air performed very well, above expectations, actually. I think it's proof of how AI development and IDEs can work together, all the while humans stay in charge.
- Finally, about the platform itself: many have called it a fresh breath of air where actual humans talk to other humans. This is what sets /dev/null apart, and we hope we can keep it.
So, what now? A couple of things: today we're launching /dev/null on Product Hunt, I will also go live in an hour or two to continue to work on it. Finally, you might be interested in taking a look? The URL is https://dev-null.sh.
See you there?
Brent