Code Golf: An Agentic Loop in PHP

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a lot of discussion recently about agent frameworks - orchestration layers, SDKs, harnesses. Over lunch I found myself curious about how much of that is actually essential. How small could a working agentic loop be, whilst still doing useful work? The result is 821 bytes of PHP, running entirely locally via Ollama with a single shell tool - and it turns out that gets you surprisingly far.

Code-Golf on Edd Mann

Code Golf: An Agentic Loop in PHP