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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

It’s also now ridiculously easy to simply cherry pick from open source without actually “using” it.

“I need to do foo in my app. Libraries bar and baz do these bits well. Pick the best from each and let’s implement them here”

I’d not be surprised if npmjs.com and its ilk turn into more a reference site than a package manager backend soon.

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I literally have a Claude Code skill called "/delib" that takes takes in any nodejs project/library and converts it to a dependency-less project only using the standard library.

It started as a what-if joke, but it's turned out to be amazing. So yeah, npmjs.com is just reference site for me now, and node_modules stays tiny.

And the output is honestly superior. I end up with smaller projects, clean code, and a huge suite of property-based tests from the refactor process. And it's fully automatic.

It's that easy yes, and someday, we will literally be able to prompt "Redo the Linux kernel entirely in Zig" and it will practically make a 1:1 copy.

Interesting - I am interested to know how’s it impacting the codebase size interms of lines of code.

It varies from project to project, but applications benefit a lot more than libraries. When I de-lib a normal express app it might add a few hundred lines of code and a few thousand new tests, but if I de-lib an library then depends on how ancient it is. The older the library is, the higher the chances that most of what it needs is built-in to the standard library.

Thank you. I have been thinking about the same approach. However my worry is the open source libraries often gets more eyeballs and CPU cycles and ends up much more refined over a period of time.

Ironically, given the recent supply chain attacks, that may be also more secure.

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