Neuron AI

In the last few months I heavily worked to push the AI agents integration into my SaaS product to a higher level. It was a very long journey, started more than a year ago with the first experiments. I had to say that understanding all the moving parts of an AI driven system was far from easy. As a PHP developer I struggled a lot, mainly because the PHP ecosystem to develop this kind of “Agentic” features into existing applications it’s not as advanced and rich as it is in other technologies. Python and Javascript are “driving the bus”, and obviously other developers working with different programming languages are creating their artifacts to get the opportunity to start their journey too. Six months ago when I started working on this chapter I took in consideration some packages that were getting attention like LLPhant, or Prism. There was a lot of development behind these packages and they have already implemented a lot of things. But for my needs they have too serious weaknesses to consider ​​building the foundation of this chapter for my business on these libraries. Prism is exclusively for Laravel, so you are locked in, and LLPhant has a lot of different classes and looks more like a library than a framework. It also lacks features like Memory, chat history, observability. Yet, the opportunity is too great to pass up. # The unsustainable path From the beginning I realized that I could not look at other programming languages. It is not sustainable. And I am sure that is the same for most developers who specialize in a particular technology. If you have a PHP application you can’t implement an agent in javascript or Python, because they need your application data and context to generate their magic (authentication, authorizations, database connection, cache, etc). Transferring this data and context to an external entity written in another language leads to a lot of code duplication, or technical constraint that are not sustainable. I started believing that the artifact I created for myself was really really good, at least in my perspective. So I decided to release this internal tool as an open source project: Neuron AI, open source Framework to integrate full featured AI Agents into your existing PHP application. # Why I decided to make it open source The journey I would like to explore is inspired by LangChain, giving people the power to create Agentic entities into PHP applications, with a complete open source toolkit. And provide support and long term visibility thanks to the professional monitoring and debugging service powered by Inspector.dev At the same time I believe it can really help PHP developers “jump into the AI bus” with stronger foundations. It seemed to me a clear opportunity. I hope it can get you the answers you are looking for to continue to build great software with your preferred programming language.