If eventually the home models are good enough that you dont even need a cloud AI provider, what happens to their bottom line? Local AI can do local tool calling just like Claude Code can do.
PHP was so simple and easy to understand that anyone with a text editor and some cheap shared hosting could pick it up, but also low level enough that almost nothing was magically done for you. The result was many inexperienced developers making really basic mistakes while implementing essential features that we now take for granted.
Frameworks like Next.js take the complete opposite approach, they are insanely complex but hide that complexity behind layers and layers of magic, actively discouraging developers from looking behind the curtain, and the result is that even experienced developers end up shooting themselves in the foot by using the magical incantations wrong.
Totally agree. Nextjs is a vehicle to sell their PaaS, every other feature is a coincidence.
What’s worse is vercel corrupted the react devs and convinced them that RSC was a good idea. It’s not like react was strictly in good hands at Facebook but at least the team there were good shepherds and trying to foster the ecosystem.
PHP had plenty of magic and footguns, magic_quotes, register_globals, mysql_real_escape_string, errors with stacktraces leaking into the HTML output by default, and these are just from the top of my head.
You should be aware that any model you can run on less than $10k worth of hardware isn't going to be anywhere close to the best cloud models on any remotely complex task.
Many providers out there host open weights models for cheap, try them out and see what you think before actually investing in hardware to run your own.
On one hand, I hate how much of a hype-driven commercial product Laravel is, and how many novice developers learn bad practices from its awful architecture.
On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.
The prime example I'll always reach for is the fact that it makes use of PHP classes to represent database entities, but not really - the """classes""" don't actually declare any of their properties, it's all dynamically injected at runtime from the database columns. You need a Laravel-specific IDE plugin just to get basic code completion and static analysis.
In addition to what /u/bakugo already said, they also have custom global magic functions all over the place.
The code discipline and patterns they encourage are so bad that they had to wrap PhpUnit into their own version of the unit test framework named Pest, because PhpUnit intentionally discourages those patterns natively.
While architecture astronauts are clutching pearls, I've built multiple profitable products with Laravel without caring the slighest about the internals, both before and after AI.
PHP was always all about just building stuff while ignoring code quality. Laravel is a natural extension of that approach. Let us live.
No, Symfony is singlehandedly keeping PHP relevant, to the point that every other framework depends on its packages, Laravel included.
Most people like you who don't care about code quality and want to "just build" another B2B SaaS unmaintainable pile of spaghetti are now purely relying on AI and not writing any code themselves anymore, so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?
> so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?
Because there is nothing remotely close to Laravel for JS. I don't want to think about auth, job queues, mailing, cache layers, auditing etc. I want an opinionated default from my framework that is thoroughly documented and part of the AI training corpus. Laravel gives that to me.
And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that?
Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
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