Essentia — Agent-Optimized Output

Introduction

CakePHP Essentia is agent-optimized output for PHP tools. It works with any CakePHP project that uses PHPUnit, Pest, Paratest, PHPStan, Rector, PHPCS, or the CakePHP console.

It detects when your tools are running inside an AI agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Gemini CLI, and others — and replaces verbose, human-readable output with compact, structured JSON. For CakePHP console commands, it strips ANSI colors, box-drawing characters, and excess whitespace. Zero config — just install and it works.

Essentia only activates when it detects an AI agent. When you or your team run tools directly in the terminal, the output is completely unchanged — same colors, same formatting, same experience. Zero impact on human workflows.

Installation

Requirements

• PHP 8.4+
• CakePHP 5.0+
• PHPUnit 12–13, Pest 4–5, Paratest, PHPStan, Rector, or PHPCS (as dev dependencies)

Installation via Composer

Install Essentia as a dev dependency in your CakePHP application or plugin:

composer require crustum/essentia --dev

That's it. Essentia hooks into PHPUnit, Pest, Paratest, PHPStan, Rector, and PHPCS automatically through Composer's autoload file (src/Autoload.php). No plugin bootstrap or Application.php changes are required.

For CakePHP console output cleaning, Essentia registers automatically when bin/cake.php (or bin/cake.bat on Windows) is invoked inside an agent environment.

How It Works

Essentia uses the agent-detector package to detect AI agent environments (Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, Gemini CLI, and others).

When an agent is detected:

1. Essentia identifies the running tool from the CLI binary (phpunit, pest, phpstan, cake.php, etc.).
2. A tool-specific driver captures and suppresses verbose output during execution.
3. At shutdown, Essentia emits a single line of compact JSON with the result summary.
4. On failures, structured details (file paths, line numbers, messages) are included.

When no agent is detected, Essentia does nothing — your tools behave exactly as before.

Supported Tools

Tool	Driver	Agent output
PHPUnit	phpunit	Structured JSON
Pest	pest	Structured JSON
Paratest	paratest	Structured JSON
PHPStan	phpstan	Structured JSON
Rector	rector	Structured JSON
PHPCS	phpcs	Structured JSON
CakePHP console	cake	Cleaned text (no JSON)

Before & After

Your test suite with 1,000 tests goes from this:

PHPUnit 12.5.14 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

.............................................................   61 / 1002 (  6%)
.............................................................  122 / 1002 ( 12%)
...
..........................                                    1002 / 1002 (100%)

Time: 00:00.321, Memory: 46.50 MB

OK (1002 tests, 1002 assertions)

To this:

{"tool":"phpunit","result":"passed","tests":1002,"passed":1002,"duration_ms":321}

That's up to 99.8% fewer AI tokens. The output is constant-size regardless of how many tests you have — and when tests fail, it includes file paths, line numbers, and failure messages.

Extra output from Pest plugins like --coverage or --profile is captured, cleaned of ANSI codes and decorations, and included as a raw array in the JSON:

{
  "tool": "pest",
  "result": "passed",
  "tests": 1002,
  "passed": 1002,
  "duration_ms": 1520,
  "raw": [
    "Http/Controllers/Controller 100.0%",
    "Models/User 0.0%",
    "Total: 33.3 %"
  ]
}

PHPUnit, Pest & Paratest

All three test runners produce the same compact JSON shape on success:

{"tool":"pest","result":"passed","tests":129,"passed":129,"duration_ms":843}

On failure, Essentia includes structured failure details:

{
  "tool": "pest",
  "result": "failed",
  "tests": 129,
  "passed": 128,
  "failed": 1,
  "duration_ms": 901,
  "failures": [
    {
      "test": "it validates input",
      "file": "tests/Unit/ExampleTest.php",
      "line": 12,
      "message": "Failed asserting that false is true."
    }
  ]
}

PHPStan

PHPStan output is converted to structured JSON:

{
  "tool": "phpstan",
  "result": "failed",
  "errors": 2,
  "error_details": {
    "src/Controller/AppController.php": [
      {
        "line": 9,
        "message": "Method AppController::index() should return int but returns string.",
        "identifier": "return.type"
      },
      {
        "line": 14,
        "message": "Call to an undefined method AppController::doesNotExist().",
        "identifier": "method.notFound"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Rector

Rector is automatically run with its native JSON output format:

{
  "tool": "rector",
  "result": "failed",
  "totals": {
    "changed_files": 1,
    "errors": 0
  },
  "file_diffs": [
    {
      "file": "src/Model/Entity/User.php",
      "diff": "--- Original\n+++ New\n@@ ...",
      "applied_rectors": [
        "Rector\\Php54\\Rector\\Array_\\LongArrayToShortArrayRector"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "changed_files": [
    "src/Model/Entity/User.php"
  ]
}

PHPCS

PHPCS output is converted to compact structured JSON. On a clean run, only totals are emitted — no file listing:

{"tool":"phpcs","result":"passed","errors":0,"warnings":0}

When issues are found, only files with errors or warnings are included:

{
  "tool": "phpcs",
  "result": "failed",
  "errors": 1,
  "warnings": 0,
  "files": {
    "src/Controller/AppController.php": {
      "errors": 1,
      "warnings": 0,
      "messages": [
        {
          "message": "Missing doc comment for function index()",
          "source": "CakePHP.Commenting.FunctionComment.Missing",
          "severity": 5,
          "fixable": false,
          "type": "ERROR",
          "line": 21,
          "column": 12
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

CakePHP Console

When running CakePHP console commands inside an agent environment, Essentia cleans command output — stripping ANSI colors, box-drawing characters, dot separators, and excess whitespace:

# Before (without Essentia) — verbose decoration
  Connectors ............................................................. 16

# After (with Essentia) — same information, no decoration
 Connectors: 16

CakePHP console output remains human-readable text. Essentia does not wrap console output in JSON because command output varies widely across commands.

Supported invocations:

bin/cake.php migrations status
bin/cake saloon list

On Windows, bin/cake.bat is also supported.

Environment Variables

Variable	Description
CURSOR_AGENT=1	Detected automatically by agent-detector in Cursor
ESSENTIA_FORCE=1	Force Essentia activation even outside an agent environment (useful for testing)
ESSENTIA_DISABLE=1	Disable Essentia entirely

Example — test Essentia output locally:

ESSENTIA_FORCE=1 composer test

On Windows (PowerShell):

$env:ESSENTIA_FORCE='1'; composer test

Disabling Essentia

To disable Essentia for a single command:

ESSENTIA_DISABLE=1 composer test

To disable Essentia for an entire session:

export ESSENTIA_DISABLE=1

On Windows (PowerShell):

$env:ESSENTIA_DISABLE='1'