MCP?

StuardoRodriguez

With all the buzz about AI with Copilot, VSCode, etc and the Laravel Boost MCP. Is there an MCP for Devsense's PHP?

JakubMisek

StuardoRodriguez Thank you for the suggestion!

We have been discussing providing MCP support, but haven't find a good use case.

Do you have any specific suggestion, how we could contribute? We're actually keen to make use of it

StuardoRodriguez

It is hard for me, as a user, to understand who is in charge of what, Is it the php plugin? is it vscode? is it copilot? is it the language server?

What I would like to see, is to tell copilot,

"in current xdebug session, step debug why X or Y is happening",
or "iterate multiple times via xdebug until you find the error",
or "according to the php language server (i guess), this function is referenced 10 times, go to each reference and refactorize the params to use an object instead of the int id.

But like I said, I don't know if that's something the php plugin needs to offer, an MCP, vscode, or who.

JakubMisek

StuardoRodriguez

Thank you; this is very generic (not specific to just PHP), and VSCode+Copilot should be able to do it.

As I understand, you'd like to ask Copilot why is something happening in your code?
To break debugging once an exception or error happen, you can check the following:
Refactoring parameters using static analysis+AI is something we can add though.

StuardoRodriguez

I saw how, when using Laravel Boost, Copilot can now connect to the DB, run queries, use Tinker to generate code that instantiates models, and see the actual data from the DB. Without Laravel Boost (MCP), copilot had to "guess" the data that may (or may not) be in the DB.

Laravel Boost is the layer that helps me connect Copilot with the real data, to really run my code.

I was thinking if there may be a way to tell Copilot to somehow use xdebug to better debug the code, not just guess, but to actually run a step debugging session, and debug step by step, with the data that comes from the browser.

I haven't found how to tell copilot to do that, and I thought maybe it's missing an MCP to learn how to use xdebug, or how to use the debugging module of vscode.

JakubMisek

StuardoRodriguez I see, thank you for the hints.

It makes sense with Laravel specific DB.

VSCode has already full access to the debug session; we could add a "tool" for Copilot to control any debug session basically. Although it's out of scope of PHP extension - we would have make a separate extension for that.

What we can do is to provide Copilot with PHP-specific workspace context - with references, PHP version, etc.

StuardoRodriguez

Here, for example:

copilot could easily see it was only reference once, why does it need to search for it