From a critical PHP alert to several days of updates, security reviews, migrations and a redesign I'd been putting off for years.
It all started with a PHP security alert.
On 21 October 2026, fixes were released for two critical vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution. The sort of news that, when you work with systems, makes you stop what you're doing and ask which of your services might be affected.
At first, the job seemed fairly straightforward: check the installed versions, work out what needed updating, apply the fixes and make sure everything still worked.
Just a bit of maintenance, really.
Read more: I Set Out to Fix a Security Issue and Ended Up Rebuilding My Website
I've had Protos, my own programming language, in my head for a long time. For years, it was one of those ideas you keep developing mentally, revisiting, putting aside and picking up again. Artificial intelligence changed something important: for the first time, I could turn that idea into a real project without having a whole development team behind me.
There was, however, one question I hadn't answered: how could I keep developing at that pace without spending a fortune on AI? What began as a search for the cheapest tool became a small odyssey involving subscriptions, APIs, usage limits, millions of tokens and several changes of strategy.