#Table of contents

• The What
• The Why
  • The cobbler isn't always the worst shod
  • Open source power
  • AI multiplies capabilities and gives time a whole new dimension
• The How
• Conclusion of this part

#The What

Phage stands for PHP Hosting Assistant Go-Empowered (or in French: Assistant d’hébergement PHP propulsé par Go).Yes, you guessed it: Phage is a tool in the same family as Herd, Laragon, Wamp, Mamp, Xampp, and so on.

#The Why

#The cobbler isn't always the worst shod

Alright, as developers, I think pretty much all of us have at some point felt that urge to build our own tool — one shaped exactly by our own way of thinking and our own specific requirements.

Right?

Anyone who answers “no” to that question, please leave the room now!

So the first reason is simply the desire to have my own tool.

#Open source power

The second reason is that it’s exhausting to have to pay subscriptions for everything we use.

Back in my day (yes, I’m old — so what?), you bought software, you paid for the DVD, and that was it…

Today, everything is an excuse to sell you a subscription.

I’m not spitting in the soup — I do it too. For example with my newsletter for developers “Quoi de neuf les devs?”.

But I told myself: a piece of software to develop PHP apps should be fully open source.

Plus, giving back to the community feels good — and it feels even better when people actually show interest in the project (fingers crossed there will be some!).

#AI multiplies capabilities and gives time a whole new dimension

I had already looked into the subject in the past, but being naturally very curious, I could never figure out where to even start the development. With AI, after just a few questions, the path became clear.

Now, careful — I’m not saying this path is perfect, maybe it’s even terrible. I’m far from being the greatest expert on the topic. But what I can say is that the huge wall of doubt I had when searching alone turned very quickly into a ski jump ramp with only one possible path… and you just zoom down it at full speed.

So what am I trying to say?

• AI makes possible things we thought were out of reach before it arrived. It breaks down barriers.
• When used wisely, AI saves a huge amount of time — or rather stretches time, letting you accomplish way more in the same time window.

To sum up the “why”, three main reasons:

• the desire to create my own tool
• the desire to contribute something to the open source community
• the near-infinite possibilities unlocked by AI

#The How

I chat regularly with Grok. He’s always friendly and happy to discuss things with me. He’s usually pretty spot-on, and thanks to him I can quickly get up to speed on topics that interest me. He’s also an excellent thinking partner when brainstorming a project.

Nothing’s perfect, of course, but you know… just talking through a problem and trying to find the right approach very often helps you reach the good solution faster.

That’s frequently the case with Grok.

So last Friday (February 6, 2026), I asked him: “With what would you build an app to make something equivalent to Herd?

Among the suggestions, he mentioned Go and FrankenPHP.

And that’s how I passed Grok’s ideas along to Claude. Then, with his two “sons” Claude Haiku 4.5 and occasionally Claude Opus 4.6, we started chatting like two buddies about the best ways to actually implement all of this.

#Conclusion of this part

This article is the beginning of a series about Phage — and more specifically about creating software with heavy AI assistance — because I may not have mentioned it, but I’m a complete beginner in Go.

If you’re interested in following this adventure, and maybe even sponsoring Phage so it reaches a usable version faster, you can support me on my GitHub Sponsors page.Thanks for reading!