I Got Roasted on Reddit for My AI-Built CMS So I Built a Full PHP Framework Instead

Hey DEV community 👋

My name is Aamir, English isn’t my first language, and I’m not a PHP expert. In fact, I know jack shit about PHP.

A few weeks ago, I posted my homemade CMS (Zed) on r/PHP. I used AI to help write the code and even to clean up my Reddit replies (because writing perfect English is hard when it’s not your native tongue).

The response? Nuclear.

• “AI slop”
• “Vibe-coded garbage”
• “No tests, no structure”
• Someone literally asked the mods to ban “AI vibe-coding” posts
• Got flamed for using AI to reply — yes, really

I felt like an outsider crashing the “real developers only” club. I deleted the post. Logged off. Thought maybe they were right.

Then I got stubborn.

Instead of giving up, I took their “feedback” (tests? structure? real features?), used even more AI, and built something bigger.

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Meet Intent Framework v0.3.0

A zero-boilerplate, explicitly designed, AI-native PHP micro-framework — now powering my next (much better) CMS.

What’s inside:

• Immutable Request, fluent Response
• Middleware + pipeline
• Sessions + flash messages
• Full authentication (bcrypt, login, logout)
• Event dispatcher
• File-based cache with Cache::remember()
• Powerful validator
• Secure file-based API routes (outside public/)
• Built-in CLI: php intent serve, make:handler, make:middleware, cache:clear
• CSRF protection middleware
• Route groups with prefix + middleware

The Stats:

• ~3,000 lines of core code
• 69 tests, 124 assertions (nice)
• PHPStan Level 8 passing
• Mutation testing score: 85%+

📂 Repo: Intent-Framework
📄 Full docs: ARCHITECTURE.md (worth a read)

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The Reality

• Yes — I still used AI for most of it.
• Yes — It took less than a weekend of real work.
• Yes — I still don’t know what half the PHP internals do.

But it works. It’s clean. It’s tested. It’s fast. And honestly? It feels more predictable than a lot of “hand-written” code I’ve seen.

The Point

I’m not saying AI replaces developers. I’m saying tools like Claude and Grok are incredible pair programmers — especially for people like me who aren’t native English speakers or PHP gurus.

The gatekeeping on some forums (“real devs don’t use AI”) is wild. We all copy from Stack Overflow. We all use Copilot when stuck. I’m just honest about it.

AI didn’t make me lazy. It let me build faster, learn faster, and ship something real.

What’s Next?

1. Finishing the new CMS on top of Intent
2. Starting an ecosystem of packages (intent/seo, intent/comments, etc.)
3. Maybe... a live demo soon?

If you're curious, check out the repo.
Star it if you like it.
Fork it if you want to improve it.
Or just laugh — I don’t mind anymore.

Thanks for reading my comeback story. And thanks to the roasters — you motivated me more than you know.

Now shipping > gatekeeping. 🔥

Comments

[david duymelinck]

I think the main problem is not gatekeeping, but your unwillingness to learn why the code works.
I don't condone people laughing at you. But I don't think everyone did, because you got information to build your framework.

The problem with AI generated solutions is that they are limited by the knowledge of the people that prompted them. The less knowledge you have the more likely it is there are going to be problems with the code, even though it does what you want it to do.

It is not that you can build faster, that you should ship it faster. The more code you add, the more you have to understand what the parts do to make it work. And the more tests you need to have to assure there are no logic failures.

I saw in your readme you found Laravel too big to learn, there are alternatives like Slim and CodeIgniter that offer a less complex solution.

I think if you lean more to learning, people are going to be more open to give you advise.