And you can actually make sense of that code and be sure it does what you want it to.
So we might roll-your-own more things. But then we'll have a tremendous amount of code duplication, effectively, and bigger tech debt issues, minus the diamond dependency hell issue. It might be better this way; time will tell.
I am already using it for keeping track of personal stuff. I’m not going to make a product out of it or even put it on github. It’s just for me. There are gonna be a lot of single team/single user projects.
It is so fast to build working prototypes that it’s not even worth thinking if you should do something. Just ask claude to take a shot of it, get a cup of coffee and evaluate the results.
Basically, the data model is dead simple, you just spin up a SQLite db, create a React frontend, grabbing a good drag and drop library that implements these cards, write some simple but decent looking CSS, some React and backend boilerplate to wire the thing together - and boom - you're done.
This sounds simple when I write like this, but the complexity comes from knowing what library to use, figuring out its API, and assembling the whole thing together - which Claude is great at, but once you see the whole thing put together, you come to understand these things as well, and become more skilled at building stuff like this.
The absolute moment that ai is capable of producing all the useful code for a project I probably will never write another line of code again.
I knocked out a webapp to manage tickets, states, ETA, etc for me and me alone in about 30m, pre-AI.
Note: I have a pre-built very-low-code framework for doing CRUD applications that lets me do ugly but functional webapps.
I also used to have these massive sets of packages pieced together with RequireJS or Rollup or WebPack or whatever. Now it’s unnecessary.
(I wouldn’t dare swap out a JWT implementation with something Claude wrote, though.)
That express middleware library has a ton of config options that were quite the headache to understand, and I realized that it's basically a couple hundred line skeleton that I spent more time customizing than it'd have taken from scratch.
As for old JS vs new JS - I have worked more in the enterprise world before, working with stuff like ASP.NET in that era.
Let me tell you a story - way back when I needed to change how a particular bit of configuration was read at startup in the ASP.NET server. I was astonished to find that the config logic (which was essentially just binding data from env vars and json to objects), was thousands upon thousands of lines of code, with a deep inheritance chain and probably an UML diagram that could've covered a football field.
I am super glad that that kind of software engineering lost out to simple and sensible solutions in the JS ecosystem. I am less glad that that simplicity is obscured and the first instinct of many JS devs is to reach for a package instead of understanding how the underlying system works, and how to extend it.
Which tbf is not their fault - even if simplicity exists, people still assume (I certainly did) that that JWT middleware library was a substantial piece of engineering, when it wasn't.