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Extracting a library from a real world project is one of my favorite parts of software.

I'm sure the march of LLMs will continue eating into this pie, and that's a good thing (most of it is a distraction from the real work), but I love polishing a library on my laptop in a cafe. It's like working on a painting or something.

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It was, actually, very enjoyable! When we pulled React ProseMirror[1] out of the NYT text editor, it was a pretty laborious process that we had to careful plan and execute for months, and we still ended up with an internal fork for a while.

By contrast, this was mostly just moving a file around and then writing documentation and cleaning up the public API. I rather enjoy thinking about and modeling library APIs in general, so I actually had a lot of fun with it!

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@nytimes/react-prosemirror

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