Your Tool Has a New Reader

Every PHP tool that prints to a terminal now has two readers, and most of us have only been writing for one of them. The output of a PHP command-line tool used to have one reader: a developer looking at a terminal. That reader sees glyphs. The terminal interprets escape sequences, moves the cursor, erases lines, and shows the result. What the tool wrote and what the human sees are usually the same thing, and nobody thinks about the gap. A coding agent does not look at a terminal. It reads the…