Mindblowing observations.

Nah. Nothing has changed. To offload the work to an agent and make it a productivity gain it is exactly the same as using a framework, it's a black box portion of your system, written by someone else, that you don't understand.

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.

"Why do you ever need, for most of the use cases you can think of, a useless, expensive, flawed, often vulnerable framework, and the parade of libraries that comes with it, that you probably use for only 10% of its capabilities?"

Who outside of 'frontend web developers' actually do this?

I don't think this is a good description of, say, Apache Tika or Alembic's Ash.

I've never did see any value in monsters like React. Always use plain JavaScript, wrote web components and used some narrow scope 3rd party libraries. Works like a charm for me. Now instead of writing whole web components on my own I write skeletons with some comments and ask IDE with AI services (I use IDEs from JetBrains) to complete it. I then do the same with tee main application. So far the results are stellar. I do similar with my backend applications (mostly C++) but there is much more work from my side is involved as the requirements are way stricter, for example performance being a major thing.

LinkedIn article?

What frameworks and what have you accomplished with it?

AI rolled cryptographic libraries now make it feasible to just roll your own crypto.

Every day I feel closer to leaving this industry when I see articles like this.

Is software even a real industry with patterns, safety, design, performance, review, etc.

Or are we just a hype generating machine that's happy to ship the most broken stuff possible the fastest.

Why do we have to constantly relearn the same lessons.

This is about green field development which is relatively rare. Much of the time the starting point is a bunch of code using React or maybe just a lump of PHP. Business logic ends up plunked down all over the place and LLMs tend to make a huge mess with all this unless kept on a tight leash.

I'm glad this guy is doing well, but I'm dreading the amount of work being created for people who can reverse engineer the mountains of hallucinated bullshit that he and others are now actively producing.

And if the frameworks aren't useful then maybe work up the chain and ditch compilers next?

The author makes a valid observation wrapped in an overstatement. Yes, AI coding agents have changed the economics of building custom tooling. But the conclusion—that frameworks are now obsolete—misses the forest for the trees.The problem with "framework culture" wasn't that frameworks exist, but that we lost the ability to critically evaluate when they're appropriate. We reached for React for static sites, Kubernetes for three-server deployments, and microservices for monolithic problems—not because these tools were wrong, but because we stopped thinking.What AI agents actually restore isn't "pure software engineering"—it's optionality. The cost of writing a custom solution has dropped dramatically, which means the decision tree has changed. Now you can prototype both approaches in an afternoon and make an informed choice.But here's what AI doesn't solve: understanding the problem domain deeply enough to architect a maintainable solution. You can generate 10,000 lines of bespoke code in minutes, but if you don't understand the invariants, edge cases, and failure modes, you've just created a different kind of technical debt—one that's harder to unwind because there's no community, no documentation, and no shared understanding.Frameworks encode decades of collective battle scars. Dismissing them entirely is like dismissing the wheel because you can now 3D-print custom rollers. Sometimes you want the custom roller. Sometimes you want the battle-tested wheel. AI gives you both options faster—it doesn't make the decision for you.

I feel the same way, but I’m not a traditional software engineer. Just an old-school Webmaster who’s been trying to keep up with things, but I’ve had to hire developers all along.

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?