I think it's more: AI assisted engineering is a new skill people are trying to develop and we're on this collective experimentation process, working out how to use AI for engineering with varying degrees of success.
If that's true, any statements defining what is necessary to do should be ignored in that context. I'm still interested in hearing about what people tried, what results they think they saw, and then trying to apply those findings to my own processes.
Which is to say I don't think the pontificating is pointless, but as statements of Real Truth, I agree they're likely wrong. We're too early in the game.
It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
I've been doing JS for nearly a couple decades now (both front and back) and I landed on the same approach a few years ago. Pick your absolutely minimal set of dependencies, and then just make what you need for everything else. Maybe counter-intuitive to some, I feel like I'm more comfortable maintaining a larger codebase with less people.
What's more, given the tools we have today, it fits really well with agentic engineering. It's even easier to create and understand a homegrown version of a dependency you may have used before.
This is probably a semantics problem. You’re right. The models don’t know how to mcp. The harness they run in does though (Claude code, Claude desktop, etc), and dynamically exposes mcp tools as tool calls.
> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions
Which is appealing to me, and many others I suspect.
If that's true, any statements defining what is necessary to do should be ignored in that context. I'm still interested in hearing about what people tried, what results they think they saw, and then trying to apply those findings to my own processes.
Which is to say I don't think the pontificating is pointless, but as statements of Real Truth, I agree they're likely wrong. We're too early in the game.