Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

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.

Frameworks are stable by design, generated code isn't. Why people still had to learn math when calculator was invented?

It's actually so over

I don't see it as either/or. Frameworks give you a common vocabulary to use with the LLMs, and what allow you to organize your thoughts and maintain good git hygiene, and serve as a useful street map to review and explore what's been built.

You can drop the boilerplate bit pushing glue frameworks, but the building block frameworks are here to stay; LLMs know a lot, but they don’t know every solution to every problem. Do not confuse a software development LLM assistant with an oracle.

You can also decide to switch frameworks or even languages. I switched a personal app I'm working on from Go to Deno and Hono and it's quite nice.

> We can finally get rid of all that middle work. That adapting layer of garbage we blindly accepted during these years.

Oh, you accepted that? I feel sorry for you. Many of us never did.

I feel the opposite. Frameworks and standardization becomes even more important when using AI.

A huge advantage of frameworks to me is to give new comers to the code a unified frame of reference. A Rails developer (or even a non-Rails guys who understands MVC) can jump into a Rails based codebase he is not familiar with a lot easier than the custom "from the ground up" thing the author espouses.

It's puzzling to me that the author doesn't even mention this huge and obvious benefit of frameworks.

> 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.

"Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves."

So the answer is to let AI agents design it for you, trained on the data of the giants of software engineering. Got it!

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.

> 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?"

Wouldn't frameworks be better for Ai?

They're used more frequently, I couldn't imagine in python there's more examples of web servers from scratch then using flask or Django?

Frameworks provide a layer of abstraction, so the code is denser, which will use less tokens, and put less code in the prompt.

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

"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.

lol ok have fun building from zero _without_ abstractions. It will work for the narrow thing you first tell it to build, the fun comes when you tell it to change in any 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.

This line shows either he does not get how wrong he is, or I do not understand the deepness of his enlightenment. "A simple Makefile covers 100% of my needs for 99% of my use cases". We've come a long way to replace simple Makefile with autotools (incredible monstrocity), cmake, ninja etc. I hope he does not propose to ditch *libc.

"Software engineers are scared of designing things themselves."

what?

Build libraries, not frameworks.

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'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?

> 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".

> 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.

Mindblowing observations.

I feel like commenting on the article without reading was really vindicated with the advent of AI slop.

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.

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.

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?

Next up "coding agents replaced me"

ai slop shit