Since I’ve been writing a lot about decoupled application development it made sense that one of my readers asked the following question: “Why should we use a framework?” The quick answer is: because you need it. A summary of the reasons:

• It would be too much work to replace all the work that the framework does for you with code written by yourself. Software development is too costly for this.
• Framework maintainers have fixed many issues before you even encountered them. They have done everything to make the code secure, and when a new security issue pops up, they fix it so you can just pull the latest version of the framework.
• By not using a framework you will be decoupled from Symfony, Laravel, etc. but you will be coupled to Your Own Framework, which is a bigger problem since you’re the maintainer and it’s likely that you won’t actually maintain it (in my experience, this is what often happens to projects that use their own home-grown framework).

So, yes, you/we need a framework. At the same time you may want to write framework-decoupled code whenever possible.