It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part.

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 would think that frameworks make more sense than ever with LLMs.

The benefits of frameworks were always having something well tested that you knew would do the job, and that after a bit of use you'd be familiar with, and the same still stands.

LLMs still aren't AGI, and they learn by example. The reason they are decent at writing React code is because they were trained on a lot of it, and they are going to be better at generating based on what they were trained on, than reinventing the wheel.

As the human-in-the-loop, having the LLM generate code for a framework you are familiar with (or at least other people are familiar with) also let's you step in and fix bugs if necessary.

If we get to a point, post-AGI, where we accept AGI writing fully custom code for everything (but why would it - if it has human-level intelligence, wouldn't it see the value in learning and using well-debugged and optimized frameworks?!) , then we will have mostly lost control of the process.

The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing.

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.

I fail to see the obvious wisdom in having AI re-implement chunks of existing frameworks without the real-world battle testing, without the supporting ecosystem, and without the common parlance and patterns -- all of which are huge wins if you ever expand development beyond a single person.

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

Intellectual surrender is exactly the risk I fear with coding agents. Will the next generation of software ‘developers’ still know how to code? Seems coding agents are in a way taking us further from understanding the machine, just like frameworks have in the past.

My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:

> 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.

> In my mind, besides the self declared objectives, frameworks solve three problems .. “Simplification” .. Automation .. Labour cost.

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.

> That adapting layer of garbage we blindly accepted during these years.

Wouldn't everything that agents produce be better described as a "layer of garbage?"

Using a framework gives you some assurance that the underlying methods are well designed. If you don't know how to spot issues in auth design, then using an LLM instead of a library is a bad idea.

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.

I disagree about ditching abstractions. Programmatic abstractions aren't just a way to reduce the amount of code you write, they're also a common language to understand large systems more easily, and a way to make sure systems that get built are predictable.

> But the true revolution happened clearly last year

Oh, that seems like a good bit of time!

> and since December 2025

So like..1 or 2 months ago? This is like saying “over half of people who tried our product loved it - all 51% of them!”. This article is pushing hype, and is mistaking Anthropics pre IPO marketing drive as actual change.

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

I constantly see this and think I must be operating in a different world. This never took significant amounts of time. Are people using react to make text blogs or something?

When you choose the right framework it saves you enormous amounts of time. Sounds like the author has trouble separating hype from fact. Pick the right framework and your LLM will work better, too.

Even with a perfect coding agent, we code to discover what correct even is.

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 have been using Cursor w/ Opus 4.x to do extensive embedded development work over the past six months in particular. My own take on this topic is that for all of the chatter about LLMs in software engineering, I think a lot of folks are missing the opportunity to pull back and talk about LLMs in the context of engineering writ large. [I'm not capitalizing engineering because I'm using the HN lens of product development, not building bridges or nuclear reactors.]

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.

> We can finally get rid of all that middle work. That adapting layer of garbage we blindly accepted during these years. A huge amount of frameworks and libraries and tooling that has completely polluted software engineering, especially in web, mobile and desktop development. Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix.

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.

So the suggestion here is that instead of using battle tested libraries/frameworks, everyone should now build their own versions, each with an unique set of silent bugs?

I have to tell claude specifically to use plain html css js, else it goes on building react

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

The pendulum swing described here is real but I think the underlying issue is subtler than "AI vs. no AI."

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.

It never left, welcome back to software engineering though!

That took the strangest turn. It started with empowerment to do much more (and that I reallY agree with) — to then use it to... build everything from scratch? What? Why?

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.

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.

It's actually so over

Mindblowing observations.

Pretty much completely disagree with the OP. Software Engineering never left, maybe the author moved away from it instead.

> 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.

> The three problems frameworks solve (or claim to) [..] Simplification [..] Automation [..] Labour cost

and he misses _the most important problem frameworks solve_

which is correctness

when it comes to programming most things are far more complicated in subtle annoying ways then they seem to be

and worse while you often can "cut away" on this corner cases this also tends to lead to obscure very hard to find bugs including security issues which have a tendency to pop up way later when you haven't touched to code for a while and don't remember which corner you cut (and with AI you like did never know which corner you did cut)

like just very recently some very widely used python libraries had some pretty bad bugs wrt. "basic" HTTP/web topics like http/multipart request smuggling, DOS from "decompression bombs" and similar

and while this might look like it's a counter argument, it speaks for strict code reuse even for simple topics. Because now this bugs have been fixed! And that is a very common topic for frameworks/libraries, they start out with bugs, and sadly often the same repeated common bugs known from other frameworks, and then over time things get ironed out.

But with AI there is an issue, a lot of the data it's trained on is code _which does many of this "typical" issues wrong_.

And it's non-determenistic, and good at "hiding" bugs, especially the kind of bugs which anyway are prone to pass human reviews.

So you _really_ would want to maximize use of frameworks and libraries when using AI, as that large part of the AI reliability issues.

But what does change is that there is much less reason to give frameworks/libraries "neat compact APIs" (which is a common things people spend A LOT of time one and which is prone to be the source of issues as people insist on making things "look simpler" then they are and in turn accidentally make them not just simpler but outright wrong, or prevent use-cases you might need).

Now depending on you definition of framework you could argue that AI removes boiler-parts issues in ways which allow effectively replacing all frameworks with libraries.

But you still need to review code, especially AI generated code. To some degree the old saying that code is far more read then written is even more true with AI (as most isn't "written"(by human) anymore). Now you could just not review AI code, but that can easily count as gross negligence and in some jurisdictions it's not (fully) possible to opt out of damages from gross negligence no matter what you put in TOS or other contracts. I.e. I can't recommend such negligent actions.

So IMHO there is still use for some kind of frameworks, even if what you want from them will likely start to differ and many of them can be partially or fully "librarified".

If a framework, best a minimal one using web standards E.g. svelte or https://nuejs.org/.

> Layers upon layers of abstractions that abstract nothing meaningful, that solve problems we shouldn’t have had in the first place, that create ten new problems for every one they claim to fix.

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.

There is yet another issue: the end-users are fickle fashion minded people, and will literally refuse to use an application if it does not look like the latest React-style. They do not want to be seen using "old" software, like wearing the wrong outfit or some such nonsense. This is real, and baffling.

"Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves."

what?

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.

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?