Six core principles

Code should be obvious to a human.

TetherPHP must prioritise readable, understandable code. Developers should be able to open an unfamiliar project and quickly understand what it does and where things belong. No cleverness for cleverness' sake.

Everything a human can understand, an agent should be able to understand.

TetherPHP's architecture, conventions and tooling are deliberately designed for AI agents. Predictable naming, explicit dependencies, consistent structure and machine-readable context make it easy for an agent to navigate and modify an application safely.

If something matters, make it visible.

TetherPHP favours explicit behaviour over hidden framework magic. You should be able to trace a request from route to response without needing to understand a pile of implicit framework behaviour.

1. Request
2. →
3. Route
4. →
5. Action
6. →
7. Domain
8. →
9. Responder
10. →
11. Response

There should be one obvious way to do things.

TetherPHP is opinionated. Instead of giving developers five different approaches to solving the same problem, it provides a clear, consistent convention. This reduces cognitive load for both developers and agents.

The core should do less, but do it well.

TetherPHP will not become an enormous monolith. The core provides the fundamental building blocks of an application, while additional functionality is composed through packages. Small core. Strong foundations.

The framework should help you understand the application, not just run it.

TetherPHP's CLI and developer tooling are first-class. Commands such as make:action, test, inspect, explain and context help developers and agents understand, build and maintain an application. The framework isn't just the runtime — the tooling is part of the developer experience.