More interested in what meaningful fixes can be done in some fraction of the 1.2s RTT of this rapid-fire style PHP development.

Output to html, meta refresh page every second. Pretty much real-time results.

> Pretty much real-time results.

This to me feels really underrated nowadays - at best, you shouldn't always have to reason about your code inside of your head and try to figure out how it'll work in detail, or read API docs for all of the obscure frameworks that you're using.

Test things in real time at first and in the cases where they don't, continue doing so, but with a debugger and stepping through everything bit by bit, or read the docs, or whatever the non-trivial cases will demand.

In my eyes, that's the exact same thing as autocomplete in IDEs - instant feedback, to free you from having to think about yet another mundane level of abstraction or API details, instead letting you solve the actual problems that you're faced with.

I think the problem is they haven't set up tools to make it really quick. Even if the compilation only takes a few seconds, they are probably switching to a shell, firing of a make command, maybe restarting the server etc. All stuff that could (and should) be automated and available at the press of a keyboard button. In my emacs setup, any language that requires compilation I bind the key C-c C-c to "build the app now". So then compilation literally takes a few seconds not a few second plus ten seconds of overhead.