AI-augmented development for PHP teams: what to delegate and what never to outsource
A practical split for senior PHP/Laravel developers — AI for boilerplate, tests, and exploration; humans for architecture, security, queries, and release accountability.
AI-augmented delivery works when the team agrees what is delegable. I delegate repetitive scaffolding: migration stubs, test skeletons, doc blocks, and first-pass refactors. I do not delegate authorization rules, raw SQL on hot paths, or merges I have not read.
On ayo.de (Proxify), AI-assisted coding sped up internationalization and provider integration boilerplate — but every adapter boundary, retry policy, and PHPUnit assertion went through human review. CI green is the gate, not the model’s confidence.
Teams that fail with AI usually skip the spec. A one-page written scope — inputs, outputs, edge cases, performance budget — makes agent output useful. Without it, you get plausible code that fails in production.
For hiring managers: “uses Cursor” is not a skill. “AI-augmented delivery with human review on security and data” is — and it pairs well with senior backend and technical lead roles.