Senior Software Architect · 18yr PHP · Creator of Lerd - open source Herd-like alternative for Linux & macOS · Currently at Square1 Ireland

Bucharest
Joined March 2009
PHP development on a Steam Deck? Sure. lerd on an immutable OS: full dev environment installed and a new site running in under 5 minutes. No Docker Desktop, no sudo, no layering. If it works here, it works on your machine. #PHP #Laravel #SteamDeck #Linux #OpenSource #DevTools
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Shipped Lerd 1.37 this morning. The request timeline is the thing I've wanted since the first version. One id follows a request from nginx through PHP to the browser, so you click a slow request and see everything it did, queries, jobs, the page's own console errors, on one line of time. Claude Code reads the same thing over MCP and starts with what went wrong. Services sleep when nothing uses them now too. I run a lot of projects and most of their databases sat there doing nothing all day.
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
THIS is why proper IDEs will win long-term.
We connected IntelliJ IDEA’s code intelligence to Claude Code and Codex, then tested the setup with Netflix. The first public results are out. Typical efficiency gains: 20–30%. Best code-navigation case: ~65%. These results come from two real codebases. The efficiency metric averages token savings and time savings. Correctness stayed stable or improved. Here’s what we actually built. The code engine behind IntelliJ IDEA ran headlessly, giving agents access to its capabilities through a CLI backed by a daemon. LSP alone wasn’t sufficient. Agents needed a convenient way to invoke the tools. The backend also needed to stay running and keep the project index warm between calls. The idea is straightforward. An IDE has already mapped the structure of your code and its dependencies — including what’s inside compiled libraries. An agent can use that knowledge instead of spending time and tokens reconstructing it. But the most interesting finding was which models benefited most. The strongest models saw the biggest gains. Especially at higher reasoning effort. In these experiments, more capable models were also better at taking advantage of code intelligence. My takeaway: better models and better tools aren’t competing bets. You don’t have to choose between investing in model intelligence and giving agents better access to your codebase. The two can reinforce each other. Huge thanks to @pbakker and the Netflix team for working with us on this!
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
Your AI coding assistant is only as useful as what it can see and do. Lerd gives it the whole local environment. Lerd ships an MCP server, and one switch in the dashboard registers it with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Windsurf, Junie and opencode. Through it the assistant can run artisan and composer on the right PHP version, start services and workers, read logs, inspect slow requests and set up git worktrees with the right database. Instead of pasting error output into a chat, the assistant reads it directly. #MCP #AI
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
Reviewing a pull request usually means stashing your work, switching branches, reinstalling dependencies and hoping the database still matches. git worktrees fix the checkout part. Lerd fixes the rest. Every git worktree of a site becomes its own site, on its own HTTPS subdomain. Lerd installs its dependencies, builds its assets, starts its workers and sets up its database, then shows it as a tab next to main in the dashboard. So main keeps running while the branch you are reviewing runs beside it, and you can click between the two. #git #PHP
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
Lerd is a free, open-source local PHP development environment for Linux and macOS, think Laravel Herd, built for people who also run Linux. It runs nginx, PHP-FPM, your databases and services as rootless Podman containers, managed by systemd on Linux. There is no Docker daemon, nothing runs as root, and nothing is installed into your system PHP or your package manager's paths, so uninstalling leaves a clean machine. You get .test domains with trusted HTTPS, every PHP version side by side, a web dashboard, a terminal UI, a CLI and an MCP server for your AI assistant. #PHP #Laravel
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We are porting Lerd to Windows 🚀 🪟 Help us test it
The most comprehensive PHP development environment is now also available for Windows in its alpha phase. It was originally created for Linux, and then a Mac version was added; lerd.sh I’ve been working on the Windows version. github.com/lerd-env/lerd-win…
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Shipped v1.36.0. The desktop theme thing is the one I'm happiest with. You change your Omarchy or Plasma theme and every Lerd window repaints with it.
Lerd v1.36.0 is out. Lerd is a local PHP environment for Linux and macOS. You run lerd init in a project and it works out the PHP version, starts the services, writes the vhost and gives you a .test domain with HTTPS. Nginx, PHP-FPM and the services run as rootless Podman containers. New in 1.36: The dashboard follows your desktop. Omarchy, Plasma, GNOME and macOS publish the colours you picked, Lerd reads them and repaints every window when they change. The Debug window catches ray() with no Ray app installed, Monolog logs grouped by request, Sentry and Inspector exceptions with the line that threw, and the SMS and Slack messages a site sends.
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Thank you @phpstorm!
Congratulations to the recipients of PhpStorm's second wave of open-source sponsorships! For a full year, we're supporting: - Sebastian Bergmann (PHPUnit) - George Dumitrescu (Lerd) - Jerry Ma (static-php-cli) - Composer - Larabelles We're also staying committed to sponsoring the PHP Foundation. If you or your company can pitch in too, every bit helps move PHP open source forward. Learn more about the program: blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/…
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
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Lerd is one of the five projects @phpstorm is sponsoring this year. Did not see that coming when I started it. Thanks Brent.
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Shipped a PhpStorm plugin for Lerd. The tab I keep open is N+1 and slow queries, from real traffic and one click to the line. No browser tab anymore.
Lerd now has a plugin for @phpstorm. The project you open is tied to its Lerd site, so logs, PHP version, workers, services and dumps are in the IDE. It also shows N+1 and slow queries from real traffic, each one click from the line that caused it.
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People keep asking what lerd actually looks like. Easier to show it.
From a fresh Omarchy install to a running Laravel site with services, in two minutes. Real time, no cuts. lerd.sh
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George Dumitrescu retweeted
lerd now follows your Omarchy theme. Change it in Omarchy and the dashboard changes with it, no restart, no config. Shipping in the next release.
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lerd v1.35.0 is out, announced over on @lerdphp. This one came out of a single bug report: someone said Symfony was slow on macOS. It wasn't Symfony. On macOS a project is bind-mounted into the Podman VM, so a containerised PHP crosses that boundary on every file it touches. Over the same 2000 files a stat takes 108ms in a container against 4ms on the host, an include 320ms against 31ms. So PHP can run on the host now. PHP-FPM, the CLI, composer and the workers run natively, nginx and the services stay in containers. A Laravel app with Horizon and Filament went from 62 to 238 req/s under ten concurrent clients. Linux never had that boundary and is unchanged. It ships as beta, and the container runtime is still the default. Twelve dashboard themes in this one too, and disk numbers that finally tell the truth about what a cleanup actually frees.
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lerd now has its own account: @lerdphp Releases and changelogs go there from now on. First up is the 1.35 beta, which puts PHP on the host on macOS and takes a Laravel app from 62 to 238 req/s.
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lerd v1.34 is out. @nativephp runs end to end now, desktop and mobile. You can start lerd from the app list or the dashboard, no terminal needed. And nothing downloads before you have seen its size, which matters when a PHP base image rebuild is a few hundred MB.
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