alt Hacker NewsI've been reinventing the wheel since I started programming. Back then, we had no choice--there weren't any open-source libraries. But I also enjoy reinventing the wheel because (a) the wheel can be exactly how I want it, and (b) I get to learn and understand new things.
Coding agents have actually cut both ways for me. I can reinvent the wheel more easily and with higher quality, but I can also integrate an external library much more easily than before.
The other day I needed my system to download SFTP, so I had the agent build an SFTP client. It turned out that I actually needed FTPS, so I had the agent build that too.
Another time I wanted to integrate with Git repos, but instead of trying to reinvent that, I asked the agent to integrate libgit2. Of course, I asked it to add an API that matched the semantics of my system, so from my perspective, the wheel was exactly how I wanted it.
I think what's going to happen is that there will be more vertically integrated platforms that do it all. If you think about it, it's really annoying to cobble together a system from different libraries, each of which might have different semantics.
What we want, as developers, is to have a single, well-designed, integrated platform that exposes all the functionality we need in a consistent way. That's a lot easier now that LLMs can mold code to your exact specifications.
I'm biased, of course, because that's exactly what I'm building with GridWhale.
Same except I had open source libraries, I just somehow always had a worse time with them than just building it myself. (Just even getting them set up in the first place, or updated, and so on... most of them seem to be someone's "always have stuff to do at my job" insurance policy!)
But even if they were pleasant and did what I needed (this one time I installed a 5000 line lib that was missing 20 lines to do the thing it was actually designed to do.. like, they couldn't have added 20 more lines?!), an issue I have is spoilers.
Like, at university, they constantly said, ok here's a big problem in computer science.. (3 seconds later) .. aaand here's how we solved it! And I'm like agh, no! Spoilers! I want to figure it out, jeez!
That's also how I feel about "computer, just magick my entire program into existence." Spoils the fun of figuring it out!