AI will kill PHP

PHP was officially released in 1995.

Since then, how often have we heard “PHP is dead” as soon as a new technology emerges? There have been plenty that we thought would dethrone PHP, including ColdFusion, ASP, Ruby, and more. And now, people are saying that AI will either kill PHP or replace the web developers (cue my eye roll).

As I write this, according to W3Tech, PHP is still used on 77.5% of the web. Of course, one day it will die, like everything, but I don’t see this happening in the next five to ten years.

AI will surely disrupt many things and change how we use and see the internet. Yes, something like ChatGPT is promising and can write some pretty complex code. But there is one thing that I personally don’t see AI being able to do. Bear with me here.

Before I tell you, I must express one major concern about AI and developers. I’m deeply afraid that, with the help of tools like ChatGPT, developers will slowly get lazier, and it will affect their coding abilities. Because a developer who uses AI to generate code will obviously not be typing it themselves, they could lose some speed, instinct, and skills over time. Hopefully, many will notice the danger here and be careful.

The one thing I don’t see AI doing, at least for the time being, is keeping the code base scalable. Only a great team of engineers can, when focused enough on the future, plan for potential development and know where the application will go.

Again, AI will undoubtedly affect us all, but remember this: cars were supposed to be flying by the year 2000. Planes were supposed to be flying on their own by now, and the same with locomotives. Many things can be automated, but the human touch is still and will always remain the most important.