AI coding made me fall back in love with PHP

DevNash — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:19:32 +0000

Hi DEV 👋 first post here.

I'm an indie developer, and lately I've been building web apps with an AI coding assistant doing a lot of the typing. Along the way I noticed something I did not expect: the stack that works best with AI, for me, is a boring old one — vanilla PHP, vanilla JS, and SQLite. No framework, no build step, no compile.

Here's the thing I've come to believe: when AI writes most of the code, the bottleneck stops being "how fast can I type" and becomes "how fast can I see it run." And that's exactly where an old, non-compiled language quietly wins:

No build, no compile. AI edits a file, I hit refresh, I see the result. The loop is instant. No bundler, no toolchain to babysit, no waiting.
PHP is "boring," so AI is great at it. Decades of training data means the model writes idiomatic, working PHP on the first try far more often than it does for the framework-of-the-month.
Each request is self-contained. Server-rendered page = one file, simple to reason about, little hidden global state. Easy for me to review what the AI wrote, and easy for the AI to stay correct.

Going framework-free in 2026 sounds a little crazy, but paired with AI it's been the most fun and fast I've had building in years. I'm putting it into practice on a small site of brain-training games — juju.games — built entirely on this stack.

Curious if anyone else has felt this: that AI tooling quietly makes the simple, old, non-compiled stacks more attractive again, not less. 👇

DEV Community: DevNash

AI coding made me fall back in love with PHP