Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing.

'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his side.'

'Revise that so that Sam is Harsher and Frodo more stubborn.'

Sooner or later I look at that and think he'd be better off just writing the damned book instead of wasting so much time writing prompts.

The alternative is that your bespoke solution has undiscovered security vulnerabilities, probably no security community, and no easy fix for either of those.

You get the privilege of patching Node.js.

Similarly, as a hiring manager, you can hire a React developer. You can't hire a "proprietary AI coded integrated project" developer.

This piece seems to say more about React than it says about a general shift in software engineering.

Don't like React? Easiest it's ever been not to use it.

Don't like libraries, abstractions and code reuse in general? Avoid them at your peril. You will quickly reach the frontier of your domain knowledge and resourcing, and start producing bespoke square wheels without a maintenance plan.

It's worth repeating too, that not everything needs to be a react project. I understand the author enjoys the "vibe", but that doesn't make it a ground truth. AI can be a great accelerator, but we should be very cognizant of what we abdicate to it.

In fact I would argue that the post reads as though the developer is used to mostly working alone, and often choosing the wrong tool for the job. It certainly doesn't support the claim of the title

I think you are missing Consistency, unless you don't count frameworks that you write as frameworks? There are 100 different ways of solving the same problem, and using a framework--- off the shelf or home made--- creates consistency in the way problems are solved.

This seems even more important with AI, since you lose context on each task, so you need it to live within guardrails and best practices or it will make spaghetti.

> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.

Without a significant development period of this:

> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.

Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.

LLMs have been a critical tool not just in my application but in my circuit design, enclosure design (CAD, CNC) and I am the conductor where these three worlds meet. The degree to which LLMs can help with EE is extraordinary.

A few weeks ago I brought up a new IPS display panel that I've had custom made for my next product. It's a variant of the ST7789. I gave Opus 4.5 the registers and it produced wrapper functions that I could pass to LVGL in a few minutes, requiring three prompts.

This is just one of countless examples where I've basically stopped using libraries for anything that isn't LVGL, TinyUSB, compression or cryptography. The purpose built wrappers Opus can make are much smaller, often a bit faster, and perhaps most significantly not encumbered with the mental model of another developer's assumptions about how people should use their library. Instead of a kitchen sink API, I/we/it created concise functions that map 1:1 to what I need them to do.

Where I agree with the author of this post is that I feel like perhaps it's time for a lot of libraries to sunset. I don't think replacing frameworks is the correct abstraction at all but I do think that it no longer makes sense to spend time integrating libraries when what you really need are purpose-built functions that do exactly what you want instead of what some library author thought you should want.

I agree though there's many non-critical libraries that could be replaced with helper methods. It also coincides with more awareness of supply chain risks.

Team decides on vague requirements, then you actually have to implement something. Well that 'implementing' means iterating until you discover the correct thing. Usually in lots of finicky decisions.

Sometimes you might not care about those decisions, so you one shot one big change. But in my experience, the day-to-day on a production app you can 100% write all the code with Claude, but you're still trying to translate high level requirements into "low"-level decisions.

But in the end its nice not to care about the code monkey work going all over a codebase, adding a lot of trivial changes by hand, etc.

I disagree. At least for a little while until models improve to truly superhuman reasoning*, frameworks and libraries providing abstractions are more valuable than ever. The risk/reward for custom work vs library has just changed in unforeseen ways that are orthogonal to time and effort spent.

Not only do LLMs make customization of forks and the resulting maintenance a lot easier, but the abstractions are now the most valuable place for humans to work because it creates a solid foundation for LLMs to build on. By building abstractions that we validate as engineers, we’re encoding human in the loop input without the end-developer having to constantly hand hold the agent.

What we need now is better abstractions for building verification/test suites and linting so that agents can start to automatically self improve their harness. Skills/MCP/tools in general have had the highest impact short of model improvements and there’s so much more work to be done there.

* whether this requires full AGI or not, I don’t know.

The actual problem most teams have isn't writing code — it's understanding what the code they already depend on is doing. You can vibe-code a whole app in a weekend, but when one of your 200 transitive dependencies ships a breaking change in a patch release, no amount of AI is going to help you debug why your auth flow suddenly broke.

The skill that's actually becoming more valuable isn't "writing code from scratch" — it's maintaining awareness of the ecosystem you're building on. Knowing when Node ships a security fix that affects your HTTP handling, or when a React minor changes the reconciliation behavior, or when Postgres deprecates a function you use in 50 queries.

That's the boring, unsexy part of engineering that AI doesn't solve and most developers skip until something catches fire.

What a framework gives me is mostly other people having done precisely the architectural work, that is a prequisite to my actual work. It's fantastic, for the same reason that automatic coding is. I want to solve unsolved problems asap.

I am so confused by the disconnect that I feel like I must be missing something.

The author is right, eliminating all this framework cruft will be a boon for building great software. I was a skeptic but it seems obvious now its largely going to be an improvement.

LLM generated code is the ultimate abstraction. A mess of code with no trusted origin that nobody has ever understood. It's worse than even the worst maintained libraries and frameworks in every way.

> Stop wrapping broken legs in silk. Start building things that are yours.

This however is deeply wrong for me. Anyone who writes and reviews code regularly knows very well that reading code doesn't lead to the same deep intuitive understanding of the codebase as writing same code.

So, no, with AI you are not building things which are yours. You might call them yours, but you lose deeper understanding of what you built.

what?

I’m an idea’s guy, and in the past month or so my eyes have also fully opened to what’s coming.

But there’s a big caveat. While the actual grunt work and development is going away, there’s no telling when the software engineering part is going to go away as well. Even the ideas guy part. What happens when a simple prompt from someone who doesn’t even know what they’re doing results in an app that you couldn’t have done as well with whatever software engineering skills you have?

Unless you are quite literally spending almost the same amount of time you'd spend yourself to deeply understand each component, at which point, you could write it yourself anyway, nothing has changed when it comes to the dynamics of actually authoring systems.

There are exceptions, but generally speaking untempered enthusiasm for agents correlates pretty well with lack of understanding about what engineering software actually entails (it's about relational and conceptual comprehension, communication, developing shared knowledge, and modeling, not about writing code or using particular frameworks!)

EDIT: And to be clear, the danger of "agentizing" software engineering is precisely that it promotes a tendency to obscure information about the system, turn engineers into personal self-llm silos, and generally discard all the second-order concerns that make for good systems, resilience, modifiability, intelligibility, performance.