Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

I did asked AI to generate landing page. This gave me the initial headers, footers and styles that I used for my webapp but I threw away everything else.

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.

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.

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.

Even just some AI-assisted development in the trickier parts of my code bases completely robs me of understanding. And those are the parts that need my understanding the most!