LLMs finally deliver on the crochety front end dev's dream of writing everything in vanilla JS. Hallelujah.

There is a fourth reason to use a framework: onboarding.

It does not work much for Django, as every project I saw using it has a different shape, but it works very well for Rails, as all projects share the same structure. However, even for Django, there are some practices that a newcomer to a project should expect to find in the code, because it's Django. So, maybe onboarding on a LLM coded project is just picking the same LLM as all the other developers, making it read the code and learning what kind of prompts the other developers use.

By the way, does anybody mind to share first hand experiences of projects in which every developer is using agents? How do those agents cope with the code of the other agents?

It never left, welcome back to software engineering though!

I see Libraries and frameworks as a way to capture knowledge and best practices so it can be shared with other people. So looking wat a LLM/AI does, it looks to me that this would be a perfect fit. Without the dependeny hell, unresolved github issues, need to fork and leaving maintainers. It could be opensource on steroïdes, with far shorter feedbackloops (just working in your IDE).

The main burden I see is validation of the output and getting reproducable results. As with many AI solutions.

What they are basically saying : a framework built up from bash-or-makefile-ground by an LLM, is better than any existing framework. I don't agree. When I use LLMs to generate scripts for me, I often have to adapt them to fit in the bigger picture. The more scripts I have, the more blurred becomes what that framework as a whole stands for. Then to become a usable framework, refactoring is needed, which means the calls to those scripts need rewriting and retesting as well.

Frameworks are the reasons why AI can learn patterns and repeat, without frameworks you will be burning credits just to do things that been optimized already and completed. Unless you are Anthropic investor, thats not the way to improve your coding.

Yes, that was one of the first aha moments for me; put simply:

It's now cheaper to try diving into a system to change it, opposed to the 'safe' path to built on-top-off and adapt to it.

I think if anything frameworks will become more important. They are already built into the training data of these models and they provide guardrails like protection against xss and sql injection. They are an architectural decision like anything else but why reinvent the wheel even if its an LLM doing the work?

Frameworks help you reduce to the point to irreducible complexity.

Not using a framework means creating and maintaining a new and bad one.

And the AI doesn’t even do that. They repeat and create new complexity

Strange how many people are comparing code to art. Software engineering has never been about the code written, it’s about solving problems with software. With AI we can solve more problems with software. I have been writing code for 25 years, I love using AI. It allows me to get to the point faster.

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.