The Death of Frameworks

Frameworks are dying—or perhaps already dead. What do I mean? Web frameworks, whether for .NET, PHP, Laravel, or ASP.NET, will likely see diminishing investment and fewer major updates in the future. Here's why I believe this is happening.

1. The Unification of Frameworks

Recently, we've seen fewer new paradigms and concepts in framework development, which makes sense. Frameworks operate within a bounded context, and eventually, all possible concepts get created. You can only reinvent the wheel so many times.

Front-end frameworks like Svelte, Vue, and React have begun implementing similar features and approaches. This convergence happens because we've identified best practices, and all frameworks are evolving toward that state. We find ourselves rehashing established ideas that are now well known due to Google, books, AI, and common knowledge.

It's becoming harder to have a truly controversial thought about frameworks because we're converging toward sameness. I call this process "samification." This convergence marks the first major factor in the death of frameworks.

2. The Impact of LLMs and AI

LLM training is expensive and requires vast amounts of data. These systems have already consumed most established code examples, which predominantly use existing frameworks. We've witnessed Stack Overflow's decline as developers bypass Google searches in favor of asking LLMs directly.

Additionally, GitHub and other public repositories will increasingly contain AI-assisted code due to vibe coding. Eventually, people will realize there's little point in creating new frameworks or syntaxes because LLMs excel at using older, well-documented frameworks with thousands of examples already baked into their training.

This AI-generated content will compound as tools like GitHub Copilot produce more code based on existing patterns. The cycle reinforces itself, making new frameworks increasingly irrelevant.

3. Shifting Skill Set Value

For large companies, creating new frameworks offers diminishing returns. With so many capable frameworks already available, the market no longer rewards framework creation skills.

Instead, the industry values people who can orchestrate different systems—architects who know how to integrate services, implement API calls, enhance monitoring and tracing, and strengthen cybersecurity. These orchestration skills will become increasingly valuable.

We're also seeing fewer low-level engineers due to the explosion of companies operating at the application layer. The "samification" I mentioned eliminates the need to create your own framework—you simply use an existing one for your specific business case.

Moreover, we're witnessing a shift toward "good enough" understanding. It's becoming harder to find engineers with deep system knowledge because shallow understanding usually suffices for most applications.

4. Macroeconomic Trends

Billions of dollars are flowing into artificial intelligence, and this investment comes at a cost to other areas. This including framework development.

Most applications today run fast enough on consumer hardware that there's rarely any need to invest in building faster or more convenient frameworks. We can trust that processing power will continue increasing, so applications that run suboptimally today will perform better tomorrow simply because of hardware improvements.

We're also seeing specialized AI hardware from companies like Apple and NVIDIA becoming accessible to small businesses. This means both software and hardware research funding will continue shifting toward AI, leaving less money for frameworks and new languages.

Existing markets already face significant competition, so investors are reluctant to fund projects in saturated spaces. They prefer opportunities with potential for outsized returns—10x, 20x, or 100x—which is impossible in highly competitive markets. These macroeconomic forces work against frameworks, further cementing their decline.