Compare to what happened to Python. That will cheer you up!

How many times has the stable and established X surprised you with some unexpected behavior?

Once upon a time I wanted a URL /like/this/with%2Fslashes/ where a path parameter could, in rare cases, contain an encoded slash. Legit according to every RFC I checked. Works fine in browsers. But I couldn't get the web server to not convert it to a / before hitting my code. And woe betide thee who wants to make nginx return a custom error code 444.

Django is the only thing I've used where I've vibe-coded an app, then looked at the code and not been appalled.

I've been using elixir professionally and for hobby work for the past 7 years now. Language models are damn good at it, and have been for some time.

The language isn't huge, the documentation has always been very good, and the patterns extremely consistently across the community. I almost wonder whether it's smaller community has been a benefit, as LLMs have been trained on a tighter set of code samples.

I can't speak for Ruby or PHP.

Is that what's happening in this example, though? Ditching TypeScript in favor of PHP seems to be a net positive in favor of having a reliable, performant tech stack. From certain perspectives, TypeScript is itself a form of technical debt: writing code in one language just to transpile it into another interpreted language just to add type safety to correct for human error seems like a heavy layer of complexity just to make development teams work faster.

If we get to the point where AI tools are able to consistently able to produce desired results within strict performance and security constraints, without having to make the same tradeoff between delivery velocity and final quality, why would we not have them target the lowest level feasible for implementation, and cut out all of the middleware cruft that makes everything slow and take up ten times the RAM it actually needs to?

I disagree. We've been doing this for two decades already. A lot of monoliths were rewritten in a way that best fit the AWS pricing model of the time with the software itself seemingly being an after afterthought. (I'm not here to discuss whether monoliths or micro services are better, I'm just saying the choice of how they were rewritten was too often mostly for AWS pricing)

I think you're completely misreading what I wrote.

PHP (lets use this as an example) brings already many benefits over a common solution like a TypeScript monorepo mostly operational simplicity. That was already true before AI.

It's boring, very fast and easy to deploy, offers straightforward horizontal scaling, no need to orchestrate containers and/or multiple runtime processes, has excellent html rendering (nothing in JS-land really does), and has very solid framework solutions like Laravel where everything works out of the box.

Those merits existed before AI already.

The issue was that you had to buy into PHP as a language, which was a horrible experience.

But if AI writes most of the code? Suddenly PHP becomes an excellent candidate to choose for many use cases.

If anything, AI makes the choice of programming and languages and software about finding the right tool for the job. Somehow the industry instead keeps vomiting React/Tailwind slop which are the right tool for 1% of the jobs.

I hope to have cleared the concept.