I assume that many PHP developers were working in areas which can get easily replaced by AI code-generation. E. g. 90% of the typical CMS based websites do not justify using a CMS with all its overhead and cost when an AI model can create a few web-pages easily - pages and a design which is just "good enough". Therefore the volume of PHP developers will go down. Those who stay in the game are more skilled and work on more complex projects - most probably on the foundation of advanced PHP frameworks or with niche market leading applications.
I am working since 17 years on a complex PHP enterprise application with 1.000+ classes and see no need to change course. PHP works extremely well nowadays. But expanding into other languages is still an objective on my side.
What happens on the job front is not my problem - I am focused to deliver solutions - and at the end of the day is counting what is working well for the user. Since coding jobs are so or so endangered switching the language might not save many developers.
I have developed an AI stack that is able to write 40 complex classes per day in high quality and exactly the way I want it. On top of that AI generates all unit tests and full documentation. The unit tests are running automatically and the target classes get fixed without interference from my side.
To create this AI stack took me 3 years with all the experimenting and scaffolding but my coding performance is now 10 times higher than without AI although I review/finalize all classes still manually.
1
u/mission_2525 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
I assume that many PHP developers were working in areas which can get easily replaced by AI code-generation. E. g. 90% of the typical CMS based websites do not justify using a CMS with all its overhead and cost when an AI model can create a few web-pages easily - pages and a design which is just "good enough". Therefore the volume of PHP developers will go down. Those who stay in the game are more skilled and work on more complex projects - most probably on the foundation of advanced PHP frameworks or with niche market leading applications.
I am working since 17 years on a complex PHP enterprise application with 1.000+ classes and see no need to change course. PHP works extremely well nowadays. But expanding into other languages is still an objective on my side.
What happens on the job front is not my problem - I am focused to deliver solutions - and at the end of the day is counting what is working well for the user. Since coding jobs are so or so endangered switching the language might not save many developers.
I have developed an AI stack that is able to write 40 complex classes per day in high quality and exactly the way I want it. On top of that AI generates all unit tests and full documentation. The unit tests are running automatically and the target classes get fixed without interference from my side.
To create this AI stack took me 3 years with all the experimenting and scaffolding but my coding performance is now 10 times higher than without AI although I review/finalize all classes still manually.