new — Ask my AI assistant anything about me → jamesgifford.ai
// thoughts
On software, engineering, and building things.
I've worked remotely for over a decade now. Not because it was trendy during the pandemic, and not because I couldn't find an office job. I work remotely because — after ten years of doing it — I've come to believe it produces better engineering outcomes when teams are intentional about how they communicate.
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Everyone's chasing the new thing. AI-native architectures, serverless everything, the framework-of-the-month. And sometimes those choices make sense. But for most businesses solving most problems, boring technology is the right call.
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I'll be honest, I was late to this. While the tech world has been losing its collective mind over large language models, I was heads-down building things the way I've always built them: my IDE, a terminal, and twenty years of muscle memory. I'd used ChatGPT a handful of times for the kind of things everyone uses it for: rewriting an email, asking a question I didn't feel like Googling, but I'd never seriously explored what these tools could do for my actual work.
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There's a criticism I hear sometimes: that frameworks like Laravel make developers dependent, that you're not really coding if you're leaning on Eloquent and Blade and Artisan commands. I think that's backwards.
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> *Originally published October 2025. Updated March 2026.* Every so often someone publishes a "PHP is dead" article, even though PHP continues to power a massive chunk of the web. PHP 8.3 and 8.4 brought enums, fibers, typed class constants, property hooks, and other features that developers in other ecosystems take for granted, quietly arriving without fanfare.
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