🚀 Symfony AI Hackathon – My online experience
on September 12, 2025
On September 12, 2025, the Symfony AI Hackathon was held, a full day dedicated to exploring and developing the Symfony AI ecosystem. The event took place in Berlin, at Quentic's offices, but also offered a hybrid mode thanks to Slack and a WorkAdventure instance. I had the opportunity to participate remotely, in the virtual space provided, and to actively contribute on several topics related to the AI Bundle and the Agent.
🎯 The objectives of the hackathon
Symfony AI is still very young. The initiative brings together several building blocks (Platform, Store, Agent, AI Bundle, MCP SDK) but remains in the ideation and experimentation phase. The objective of the hackathon was therefore twofold:
- Explore real-life use cases of AI integration in Symfony,
- Accelerate contributions on GitHub repositories via issues and pull requests, by promoting direct collaboration between contributors.
Fabien Potencier, Nicolas Grekas and other active members of the community were present to guide and support the participants.
🗓️ The day's schedule
- 10:00 a.m. – Opening: Welcome and introduction of objectives.
- 10:15 a.m. – Topic selection: Group formation around themes such as the Doctrine Store, Platform Bridges, and response error management.
- 10:30 a.m. – Intro for beginners: Setting up the environment (Ollama, API keys, link scripts for components).
- All day: Collaborative work on GitHub and fluid exchanges in WorkAdventure's virtual rooms.
- 4:45 p.m. – Closing: Feedback, review of the day, thanks.
🔧 My technical contributions
During the hackathon, I focused on two areas: integrating the Perplexity Bridge into the AI Bundle and adding new tools to the Agent.
1. [AiBundle] Wire Perplexity bridge – Issue #534 ✅
Plug the Perplexity Bridge (recently merged) into the AI Bundle. 👉 Result: Issue closed after integration.
2. [AiBundle][Perplexity] Add platform configuration support – PR #537 ✅
Added configuration support for Perplexity in the AI Bundle. 👉 Result: Issue closed with integrated commit (c85a4bc).
3. [AI Bundle][Perplexity] Add integration for contract and token usage processors – PR #564 ✅
Added output processors related to Perplexity (contract and token management). 👉 Result: issue closed with integrated commit (f1d488b).
4. [Agent] Add tools for 3rd party integration – Issue #524 / PR #549 ⏳
Work in progress on adding many tools to the Agent, to expand its integration ecosystem with third-party services. 👉 Contribution: opening a PR (#549) to introduce various tools. 👉 Result: PR still pending, which will be continued and discussed in the coming days.
💡 What I learned
- The hybrid format (in-person + WorkAdventure) allows for true immersion even remotely. * The “let's hack it together” approach encourages rapid and concrete contributions. * Symfony AI is moving forward on several fronts:
- Store (Doctrine, MongoDB Vector Search, etc.),
- Platform Bridges (including Perplexity),
- AI Bundle (centralization of integrations),
- Agent (tooling to interact with third-party APIs),
- MCP SDK (agent interoperability). * The collective energy and responsiveness of the maintainers make it possible to accelerate the maturation of a project still in the exploratory phase.
🚀 Conclusion
The Symfony AI Hackathon was an enriching experience: contributing directly to such a young project, in a collaborative and open framework, is an excellent way to understand real needs and lay the first bricks of the ecosystem.
Symfony AI remains under construction, but this day confirmed one thing: the community is already there, motivated and creative, ready to make Symfony a key player in the integration of artificial intelligence into PHP applications.