New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
I assume you did your research and you are aware that all code you produce using an LLM based AI goes automatically into the Public Domain.
You can't add ANY license to a public domain work, it's intrinsically non copyrightable.
I would say my custom WHMCS replacement site is about 80% done now. Only took me about 2 weeks. The more I use it the more I hate my WHMCS site and can't wait to switch over. It even includes a script for importing all the relevant data from the WHMCS database into the new database. Still lots of testing to do before I go live, but at this point I feel pretty confident that I can say this is a very doable thing for most people, even if you don't know much about coding. If I keep banging away at this all day every day, I can probably be ready to go live in another 2-4 weeks.
I'm using Laravel for my framework, and I would highly recommend anyone else coming from WHMCS and familiar with PHP consider doing the same. Just the basic framework, and maybe Livewire for the UI, is all that is required. AI agents can easily code everything else, including the billing engine. Just make sure you install the Laravel AI assistant (Laravel Boost), so that AI agents are aware of the code structure and best practices, and you are good to go. WHMCS actually uses lots of Laravel code in their backend. The most noticeable of those being the Eloquent ORM. This made it fairly easy port over a couple custom made modules I use on WHMCS.
Most AI agents seem to be fairly familiar with WHMCS features. All I had to do most of the time was type something like "create a VPS hosting plan feature mimicking how WHMCS does it", and that was often enough for the agent to come up with something fairly close. I used the expensive premium agents for big architectural decisions like deciding the OOP file structure. Once that was all in place I locked in those decisions into the documents the agents read for guidance, and then used less expensive agents for most of the coding work. I would also use the premium agents for doing periodic security audits as things progressed.
A while back I put something together that just uses the existing WHMCS database. Drag and drop, worked well, but automation as a concern without WHMCS. I deleted it the next day because I was bored.
How many lines of code are you at now?
Looks like around 40,000 so far. Will probably be 50,000 by the time I am finished. Not including 3rd party libraries.
The WHMCS database is a total mess though. Lots of legacy stuff that is no longer necessary, inconsistent naming conventions, table names that don't really tell you what they do etc. I ended up renaming a lot of that to make more sense. For example, Tblhosting doesn't really makes sense for what I do, so I renamed that to subscriptions. Tblproducts was renamed to plans etc. It's not a big deal to rename things because you can just download the WHMCS database scheme from their website and tell the AI agent to create an import script. Creating that script manually would have been a PiTA, but with AI agents it's simple. I think it only took the agent about 5 or 10 minutes to do that.
Lots of other things are really simple now too. Like localizing the whole site into multiple languages. It was a one sentence command. "Localize my website to support multi languages. Bam! All the code and translations done 90% right on the first try. I asked for 3 languages initially but I can easily expand that later. I also wanted my site to support light and dark theme. That took a few more tries to get that all working 100% but it looks great now.
Oh yeah, I agree 1000% lol. Especially very old ones. It's a part of the reason I just deleted it and gave up. It was a bad plan to try to use it.
100% agree. Writing actual logic is fun while pushing a bunch of buttons, forms and tables into place is nothing but a test of endurance...
How do you infer that? Is that kind of contractual feature of the LLM companies?
I mean sure, its pretty safe to say that the result basically is one large collection of license/copyright violations (even if it can't be proven because to the result is unrecognizable) due to the models being trained on random code under various licenses (or worse none at all) which the result either doesn't comply with or are conflicting from the get go but i don't see how that could render the result public domain especially given there is jurisdictions where its impossible to actively put works in the public domain or at least unclear if/how that would function.
I am unsure if it is possible to make an universal statement in that regard. Public domain is kind of in a weird place when it comes to international copyright norms. At the very least because of the differing ideas US and various European systems stem from. The US is historically mostly concerned with the right to copy (hence copyright - originally with registration requirements and all that) while other systems are concerned with the rights of the author (largely an automatic thing - the author is the author and stays the author no matter what).
If EVERYONE can copywrite it freely then it's intrinsically non copyrightable. The very concept of copyright becomes meaningless.
Technically Public Domain is compatible with every license, however, to date, few people have chosen to base their projects on public domain code. I wonder why.
And YES AI generated code is in the Public Domain as anyone has access to it without any exclusivity or restrictions. That's the very definition of Public Domain, it belongs to everyone.
How do you plan to call it your own and apply a license to it, impose restrictions on it when everyone can do whatever they want wit it?
Use AI for throwaway projects only.
Creating an alternative of WHCMS is not THAT difficult for a programmer who has couple of years of experience.
But bugs that may appear, support, liability is something that are on whole another dimension. Even if one could, without a competent dedicated team behind, that will be hard task. And no body would want to invest that much $ in a project where such a big share is already taken by another company in the same field.
Well, like i have said in my previous post the definition public domain isn't really 100% consistent internationally. Personally i usually stay away from code that is in the public domain since chances are my local copyright system will have a different view on that (as it technically still very much belongs to the original author since the law i am governed by doesn't define a way to disclaim copyright making statements along the lines of "i hereby put this into the public domain" likely to void).
Someone governed by a different system might have a different take on this but if they want their code to be used internationally its still something that needs to be considered.
Hmm, so i guess you are mostly going by kind of a moral definition then?
While i am not sure how everyone would be able to do whatever they want with it (exactly due to copyright implications - no matter how or where those apply) i think we are pretty much in the same boat here. Its kind of what i meant by the whole aggregate likely being one big license violation. No way anyone could (at least theoretically - like i said, there is also the aspect of non-enforceability after all) apply anything to that.
Well, in case you haven't noticed, i am certainly no big fan of AI in general
It's pretty much feature complete now. If I can do it anyone can.
Introduction
The Portal is a modernized, modular billing and provisioning platform built on Laravel 13 and PHP 8.5. It delivers a premium user experience through the TALL stack (Tailwind CSS v4, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire), with a dual-panel system separating Admin and Client portals. The platform emphasizes security, scalability, and developer productivity, offering unified billing, automated provisioning, a support hub, and global localization. It includes a high-performance, one-way migration strategy for legacy WHMCS data, preserving audit trails while modernizing application state.
Project Structure
The project organizes functionality around a clean separation of concerns:
Backend: Laravel 13 with Eloquent models, Livewire v4 Multi-file Components (MFC), and modular driver interfaces.
Frontend: Tailwind CSS v4 with DaisyUI v5, Alpine.js for micro-interactions, and Blade templates.
Data: Primary app state in MariaDB; legacy WHMCS data migrated via a dedicated importer.
Operations: Systemd timers for scheduling, Reverb + Redis for real-time features, and comprehensive test coverage.
Core Components
Dual-panel authentication: Separate guards for Admin and Client, with cross-guard impersonation for support and troubleshooting.
Client Portal: Modern SPA-like experience for billing, services, tickets, and profile management, powered by Livewire MFCs and Alpine.js.
Admin Panel: Bespoke dashboard for managing clients, services, plans, invoices, transactions, tax rules, gateways, logs, and system settings.
Unified Billing: View invoices, manage payment methods, and monitor service status with real-time updates.
Automated Provisioning: Modular driver architecture for servers and services, enabling extensibility and standardized integrations.
Support Hub: Full-featured ticketing system with departments, internal notes, and real-time status management.
Global Localization: Trilingual support (EN, ES, FR) with segment-based routing, session persistence, and premium language switcher.
WHMCS One-Way Migration: Secure, schema-aligned importer that preserves historical records and audit trails while modernizing state.
Architecture Overview
The system follows a layered architecture with clear separation between presentation, domain logic, and infrastructure:
Presentation: Livewire MFCs and Blade templates with Tailwind CSS v4 and DaisyUI v5.
Domain: Eloquent models encapsulate business entities (User, Admin, Service, Invoice, Plan, etc.).
Integration: Modular driver interfaces for Gateways and Servers, resolved via factories.
Infrastructure: Laravel’s routing, middleware, authentication, and configuration layers.
WHMCS Data Migration Strategy
One-way migration approach: legacy WHMCS data is imported into modernized schema while preserving audit trails.
Temporary database strategy: importer provisions a transient environment to map legacy tables into the portal’s schema.
Data categories imported: users/accounts, plans/services, billing (invoices/transactions), and support (tickets).
Encryption handling: service passwords decrypted using WHMCS encryption hash and re-encrypted with portal key.