On reviving Univeros, and why layering AI on top of a framework is the wrong approach.
There’s a project folder I’ve avoided revisiting for almost a decade.
About seven years ago, I started working on a PHP framework that quickly became more than just a side project. It included a dependency injection container I was oddly proud of, a middleware pipeline, typed collections, and several unfinished packages with names I eventually couldn’t justify anymore. I poured countless nights and weekends into it, driven by both passion and curiosity.
But then life happened. Clients demanded my focus, I moved to new places, and the next opportunity came along. Slowly, the project fell silent. The folder where all my work lived grew quiet and untouched for years. It became a sort of a small, specific kind of guilt. A reminder of what I once started but never quite finished.
It's now clear to me that the tedious, repetitive tasks (aka the “plumbing”) killed the joy and momentum of the project, not the challenging parts, which I actually enjoyed. The endless cycle of writing actions, DTOs, responders, routes, migrations, repositories, tests, and updating docs was necessary but extremely unexciting.
