Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.
Possibly. She’s very much a self-marketer. I just figured that it was a good idea to link to the person.
I have found it useful to see the people behind the words, before accusing them of being bots.
But that does beg the question of what, exactly, is “AI slop”? If someone uses it like they would use an editor, to clean up their own prose, does that mean it’s “slop”? Editors have been placing a “corporate stamp” on words for hundreds of years. You always know when an article was placed in The New Yorker, or Harper’s Bazar, because the editor would make sure that the prose matched their style.
We’re really just at the beginning of this journey.
BTW: I’m not saying it wasn’t fully-generated AI prose, but I’m uncomfortable with “knee-jerk” accusations. I have seen some examples of misfires, when it comes to that.
According to this data (the same data referenced by WordPress marketing blog posts[1], if it's legit enough for them it's legit enough for me) WordPress usage across the web stopped growing almost all at once in 2021, with the beginning of a decline this year.
You can see an increase of other contenders (Shopify, for example) but of note is also None, which is probably related to how LLMs have been making it incredibly easy to deliver a website even without a CMS.
If you are using an LLM to write code you should grab the strongest typed thing available in the domain/organization.. Rust, Scala, Typescript, F#, etc.
The argument seems to be that they think LLMs made the implementation languages equal or irrelevant, therefore PHP is as good as any of them now. The flip side of this argument is that PHP is not any more compelling than it was before, it's just adequate now that so many deficiencies have been addressed.
Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits.
Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.
Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.
Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!
If anything, Laravel has been what has kept PHP relevant. The community (both PHP and Laravel) has continually grown year over year after the sharp decline of everyone’s poor experience with PHP < v5.0, and Laravel has clearly been responsible for that more than anything.
I perceived it to be more of a confusion over the paid/premium stuff which in hindsight wasn't that big of a deal but this highlights a precarious warning in that anytime one framework gets big enough and it muddies the boundaries between paid and free, it sends a signal to developers to look elsewhere.
In my professional career I've used Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Groovy, but in personal projects I always go with PHP. I'm just more productive with it. And I don't use all of the modern niceties of PHP, I use it exactly like it's still 2010. In my opinion, the dislike towards PHP stems from the same love for complexity that gave us all of the FP-obsession from roughly 2010-2020 (Scala, Clojure, F#, etc.)
I use it for my backend stuff. Robust, fast, safe, well-supported. Has all the right bells and whistles.
I never liked the language, but it does what it says on the tin.
I have found, in the project currently under development, that LLMs give very good PHP code. Better than mine, and I’ve been using it for 25 years. I don’t mind admitting that. PHP isn’t my main language (Swift is, and I’m still better than the LLM, for that).
I’m the same way, even for little side projects at work. Basic old-school PHP is effortless to setup and maintain on a server. It just works. This means my little side project can remain a little side project, instead of become a burden with a bunch of unnecessary complexity that modern frameworks introduce.
Anytime a hello-work tutorial starts with running a command that generates 50 boilerplate folders/files, I die a little inside.
I loved php came bundled with OSX, you just run php -s portnumber (iirc) as and you have a php enabled webserver running locally, so fun for experiments and super convenient especially compared to nowadays… i would prolly use Python, so make venv, activate, etc etc.
“false” === true because it’s not an empty string. It’s the same now that it used to be 10 years ago. The PHP equality operator is a meme, not even a joke
Aside from the LLM smell, the most egregious thing about this article to me is simply implying that it's going to be much of a surprise to people that PHP has improved since the "fractal of bad design" days. The most popular Hacker News post that matches "php" in HN Algolia is this post from 2019:
And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".
Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.
Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.
So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)
Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.
I wish AI slop blogs would get banned with extreme prejudice. I guess there's a YC company that makes AI slop blogs, so it won't happen?
I'm not so sure that it's full AI. Might have used it to clean up, but she does seem to want us to believe that it isn't.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/fagnerbrack/
That LinkedIn overview is also written by AI
LinkedIn, that platform where everyone wrote AI slop by hand before there was AI?
Possibly. She’s very much a self-marketer. I just figured that it was a good idea to link to the person.
I have found it useful to see the people behind the words, before accusing them of being bots.
But that does beg the question of what, exactly, is “AI slop”? If someone uses it like they would use an editor, to clean up their own prose, does that mean it’s “slop”? Editors have been placing a “corporate stamp” on words for hundreds of years. You always know when an article was placed in The New Yorker, or Harper’s Bazar, because the editor would make sure that the prose matched their style.
We’re really just at the beginning of this journey.
BTW: I’m not saying it wasn’t fully-generated AI prose, but I’m uncomfortable with “knee-jerk” accusations. I have seen some examples of misfires, when it comes to that.
php has a decent standard library and the edit/reload workflow suits llms quite well but I wouldn't learn it if I didn't already know it in 2026
Here's a chart to replace the mockup with: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
According to this data (the same data referenced by WordPress marketing blog posts[1], if it's legit enough for them it's legit enough for me) WordPress usage across the web stopped growing almost all at once in 2021, with the beginning of a decline this year.
You can see an increase of other contenders (Shopify, for example) but of note is also None, which is probably related to how LLMs have been making it incredibly easy to deliver a website even without a CMS.
1: https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/04/17/wordpress-market-share...
If you are using an LLM to write code you should grab the strongest typed thing available in the domain/organization.. Rust, Scala, Typescript, F#, etc.
The fact PHP finally has the features of other mature languages is just table stakes I guess?
IMO the article failed articulating what is PHP's unique selling point.
The argument seems to be that they think LLMs made the implementation languages equal or irrelevant, therefore PHP is as good as any of them now. The flip side of this argument is that PHP is not any more compelling than it was before, it's just adequate now that so many deficiencies have been addressed.
Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits.
Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.
Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.
Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!
FrankenPHP is really good but the reason perhaps PHP is left in the dust is that people reach for Typescript/Edge/Serverless hosts like Cloudflare
I personally blame Laravel for PHP's loss of relevance.
If anything, Laravel has been what has kept PHP relevant. The community (both PHP and Laravel) has continually grown year over year after the sharp decline of everyone’s poor experience with PHP < v5.0, and Laravel has clearly been responsible for that more than anything.
I perceived it to be more of a confusion over the paid/premium stuff which in hindsight wasn't that big of a deal but this highlights a precarious warning in that anytime one framework gets big enough and it muddies the boundaries between paid and free, it sends a signal to developers to look elsewhere.
Isn't PHP's biggest selling point that you can ship fast?
Can you not ship fast with a much faster language right now using LLMs?
In my professional career I've used Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Groovy, but in personal projects I always go with PHP. I'm just more productive with it. And I don't use all of the modern niceties of PHP, I use it exactly like it's still 2010. In my opinion, the dislike towards PHP stems from the same love for complexity that gave us all of the FP-obsession from roughly 2010-2020 (Scala, Clojure, F#, etc.)
I use it for my backend stuff. Robust, fast, safe, well-supported. Has all the right bells and whistles.
I never liked the language, but it does what it says on the tin.
I have found, in the project currently under development, that LLMs give very good PHP code. Better than mine, and I’ve been using it for 25 years. I don’t mind admitting that. PHP isn’t my main language (Swift is, and I’m still better than the LLM, for that).
I’m the same way, even for little side projects at work. Basic old-school PHP is effortless to setup and maintain on a server. It just works. This means my little side project can remain a little side project, instead of become a burden with a bunch of unnecessary complexity that modern frameworks introduce.
Anytime a hello-work tutorial starts with running a command that generates 50 boilerplate folders/files, I die a little inside.
What's your web server? To connect PHP with nginx you need a bunch of arcane configuration.
I loved php came bundled with OSX, you just run php -s portnumber (iirc) as and you have a php enabled webserver running locally, so fun for experiments and super convenient especially compared to nowadays… i would prolly use Python, so make venv, activate, etc etc.
“false” === true because it’s not an empty string. It’s the same now that it used to be 10 years ago. The PHP equality operator is a meme, not even a joke
You're thinking of == which type coerces the non-empty string to boolean true.
PHP is not the only language that has this type of behavior.
if("false" === true) echo "PHP sucks";
else echo "You're full of shit!";
// output
> You're full of shit!
Aside from the LLM smell, the most egregious thing about this article to me is simply implying that it's going to be much of a surprise to people that PHP has improved since the "fractal of bad design" days. The most popular Hacker News post that matches "php" in HN Algolia is this post from 2019:
https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655
And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".
Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.
Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.
So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)