Until this week, CodeSage ran its two models exactly as they ship on Hugging Face: Jina's code embedder and the ms-marco MiniLM reranker. A full index of php-src took 1,782 seconds, just under half an hour, and I got tired of waiting. CodeSage 0.38 does the same full index in 373 seconds. Nothing was retrained. The weights are the same weights; what changed is the inference graph around them, a few things in the chunker, and one SQLite query that had been quietly eating most of the run. The two rebuilt models are now public on Hugging Face, along with the scripts that produce them byte-for-byte. What CodeSage gives an agent CodeSage is a code intelligence engine for AI coding agents: a structural graph (symbols, references, dependencies) plus semantic search (embedding retrieval with cross-encoder reranking), in one Rust binary that works as a CLI or an MCP server. An agent asks it questions grep can't answer, like "what depends on this class" or "where does session handling happen", and gets file-and...

Parse Malcolm X with almost any name splitter and you get a suffix. X looks like a roman numeral, roman numerals are suffixes (John III, Henry VIII), so X becomes the suffix and the surname disappears. That's the kind of bug you only find once you already have a working parser, because it isn't a missing rule. It's two correct rules wanting the same token. Last month I wrote about the casing fix in nameparser: the idea that a parser reading Jane Doe DDS should keep Doe as the surname and DDS as a credential, using letter casing as the signal that lowercasing throws away. Version 1.3.0 is the follow-up, and it is almost entirely about collisions like Malcolm X: tokens that two disambiguation rules both claim. nameparser is a maintained fork of the dormant theiconic/name-parser, by way of codebyzach/name-parser's PHP 8.3+ modernization; the contribution here is the casing and credential layer plus a confidence pass, not the parser core. The credential that is also a name JO ANDERSO...

A while back a proposal landed on the PHP internals list: deprecate metaphone(). My first reaction was the reflex of someone who has spent years as a PHP release master. Leave the old string functions alone, people depend on them, deprecation churn is its own tax. I was ready to argue against it. Then I read the reasoning and went looking at what phonetic name matching is actually supposed to do in 2026. I changed my mind. metaphone() should go. What surprised me was not that the function is dated. It was how far the field had moved while PHP core stood still, and how weak the replacement path the RFC points at really is. So I built the replacement I wish it had recommended. metaphone() is the oldest, least accurate version of an idea that kept evolving The RFC is right, and here is the short version of why. The metaphone() in core is the original 1990 algorithm: English-only, single-key, tuned for one accent of one language. It was superseded twice. First by Double Metaphone (Lawrence Philips, 2...

Here is a bug in a name-parsing library I use at work: // theiconic/name-parser $name = $parser->parse('Jane Doe DDS'); $name->getLastname(); // "Dds" $name->getMiddlename(); // "Doe" The dental credential is now her last name. The real surname got shoved into the middle-name field. Every row with a trailing credential and no comma had some version of this, and in a list of clinicians that is most of them. The library is theiconic/name-parser, a small, genuinely useful PHP package that splits a full-name string into salutation, first name, initials, last name, suffix, and nickname. I use it at work. It does the boring parts well. But the upstream repo went quiet around 2020, and bugs like the one above never got fixed. So I forked it. Today I'm releasing iliaal/nameparser, a maintained fork that fixes the credential handling, adds a confidence signal for the cases it genuinely can't decide, and targets PHP 8.3+. Most of the fix is unglamorous boundary work. One part of it rests on a single ide...

Update, June 21 2026. This post went up at 0.2.1. Since then 0.3.0 and 0.4.0 have shipped, and one claim below is already out of date: result streaming, which I describe as the next thing on the list, now exists. Set PDO::DUCKDB_ATTR_UNBUFFERED and a large SELECT streams row by row instead of buffering. Also new since publication: DuckDB config options on the DSN or through PDO::DUCKDB_ATTR_CONFIG, real per-column types from getColumnMeta(), an appender that accepts PHP arrays for nested columns like LIST, STRUCT, and MAP, GEOMETRY decoding, and duckdbTableNames() / duckdbLastProfile() for query introspection. The walkthrough below is otherwise current. Full list in the changelog. DuckDB is the closest thing the analytics world has to SQLite. It runs in-process, needs no server, reads and writes a single file, and chews through columnar aggregate queries that would make a row-store sweat. PHP has shipped PDO_SQLite in core for twenty years. Until now it had no equivalent for Du...