The Native Code Manifesto

David Connelly ~ January 23rd, 2026

Last night I posted a tutorial on YouTube: how to build a task manager with Native PHP. A year ago, this would have been a five-minute code generator demo. Last night's version ran over an hour - every line written by hand.

I expected to get destroyed in the comments. "Going back to horses and carts." The usual.

Instead, it's the most positive response I've ever received. Ever.

Turns out, developers aren't stupid. They understood immediately what "going back to square one" actually means: we're building something AI can actually work with. They get it.

The Code Generator Revelation

Here's something that genuinely surprised me.

For four years, I've been promoting a desktop application that generates code. Five days ago, I switched off its API endpoints. I braced for the complaints.

I received exactly zero.

Not one person noticed. Not one person cared. Four years of my life, and the silence told me everything I needed to know: nobody actually wanted code generators. They wanted to understand their code. They wanted ownership. They wanted to build.

The Collective Exhale

Something is shifting. You can feel it.

Developers are breathing again. The command-line ceremonies, the dependency trees, the endless upgrade treadmills - they're exhausting. Not because they're hard, but because they're pointless. Developers have been maintaining abstractions instead of building things that matter.

And now, finally, they're asking the obvious question: why?

The Quiet Majority

For years, there's been a silent but significant group of developers who've said "no thanks" to framework bloat. They don't have an official title.

You could call them the unemployable.

Since around 2015, the job market has been dominated by "enterprise" frameworks. If you didn't play ball, you were out. This killed innovation. It caused a kind of industry-wide brain drain. Alternative thinkers were either ignored or actively ridiculed.

But something has changed. These developers now have an unexpected ally: AI tools agree with everything they've been saying. Core technologies are predictable. Core technologies are stable. Core technologies are what AI actually works well with.

The heretics were right all along.

The Evidence Is Everywhere

This isn't just my observation. The shift is being documented across the industry:

Meanwhile, in JavaScript Land

The front lines of this battle are in JavaScript.

For years, JavaScript developers have been brutalised by rewrite culture. Some of the biggest frameworks are maintained by tech giants producing code that appears to be bloated and obsolete by design. Every major version breaks everything. Every upgrade is a rewrite. The treadmill never stops.

But here's the thing: at least JavaScript never got the code police.

PHP did. Show me a PHP conference and I'll show you a stage with someone telling everybody, "You're doing it wrong unless you do it my way." Self-appointed governing bodies. Standards committees. Certification programs. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hell.

JavaScript developers might be drowning in framework churn, but they were spared the lectures. They were spared the committees. In some ways, that makes their ecosystem healthier - chaotic, yes, but at least honestly chaotic.

The Certification Game

Speaking of committees: let's talk about framework certification.

Some framework makers charge hundreds of dollars for certification. That's fine, in principle. Training costs money. But here's the catch: those certificates are tied to specific framework versions.

Think about what that means. The people who control the framework have a direct financial incentive to break it. Rewrite the framework, invalidate the certificates, sell new ones. Rince and Repeat. It's perfect.

I'm not saying every framework team does this cynically. Some technologies - Electron, for example - must version frequently to stay aligned with operating systems. That's legitimate. But when a framework's maintainers rewrite its core abstractions every eighteen months and charge for re-certification each time? That's not evolution. That's a business model.

It Was Never Really About AI

I've spent the last week positioning Trongate v2 as "the world's most AI-friendly framework." And it's true - it is.

But here's what I've realised: nobody actually cares about AI-friendliness.

What they care about is the stuff that makes something AI-friendly: simplicity, predictability, no magic, no abstractions, code you can actually read. AI was just the catalyst that gave developers permission to take back what they always wanted.

The Native PHP movement isn't about AI. It's about developers who are sick of bloat, sick of abstraction, sick of watching their craft get buried under layers of ceremony. AI just proved them right.

This movement is bigger than me. It's bigger than Trongate. It's bigger than PHP itself.

What Comes Next

Right now, Trongate v2 is the first Native PHP framework. But I don't expect it to be the last.

PHP frameworks benchmarks
Can you guess which one of these frameworks uses Native PHP?

If you're building a new PHP framework today, you have two options. You can do what everyone else does - same patterns, same abstractions, same bloat - and disappear into the crowd. Or you can go Native and ship something that's measurably faster, simpler, and more maintainable than everything else out there.

That's not a hard choice.

A Manifesto

This shift is bigger than PHP. I believe we're at the precipice of an industry-wide correction.

So I figured: let's make it official.

My first instinct was to form a committee. Hold votes. Live discussions. Collaborative drafting. Then I realised that approach has the unmistakable stench of Agile, and I'd rather not.

So I asked Grok to write it instead.

The Native Code Manifesto is now on GitHub. Fork it, star it, argue with it, improve it - whatever feels right. This isn't my manifesto. It belongs to anyone who's tired of the current state of things and ready for something simpler.

https://github.com/trongate/The-Native-Code-Manifesto

The days of ranting about what we hate are over. Now we show people what we love.

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