Do Frameworks Matter Anymore?

Olscore

Do they matter? Yes. Should you use them? No. (Mostly) This is going to be opinionated from an extreme "vibe code" viewpoint, but I think the future is "GAD" Governed Agentic Development. Designing constraints that agents must follow, and therefore different forms of frameworks. What the agents need is lines in a coloring book, the human is responsible for drawing those lines. So frameworks of the future should be focused on constraining an agent to develop properly, or designing what is and is not permitted. Building Autonomously, Open Source: https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

nostrebored

There has never been a better time to write frameworks that constrain how things have been done. Almost all of our work is on our framework internally. The latency, guarantees, build time errors, and feedback that can enable vibe coding individual implementations. I find myself constantly wishing for more framework code; I wish we had built our original framework in something that threw angrily when we abused it more. I wish our type system were more expressive, I wish our threading story were better, I wish I wish I wish. It’s never been easier to rework the whole thing, and I still am happiest when our framework is artisanal.

hresvelgr

Frameworks function the same in the agentic era as they did prior: as guardrails to prevent people from doing silly things and to keep implementations focused and bounded. Yes, they still matter.

unethical_ban

I think there is still a place, even if they have to adapt. If one thinks of frameworks, particularly ones like Rails, as higher-level languages, it makes sense. Why aren't we coding everything in assembly? Models know how humans use programming languages and existing frameworks. Some languages are becoming even more popular (rust, go) because of their performance, and because agents can write the boilerplate without the user needing to be an expert. Frameworks are (ideally) distilled, opinionated best practices that both humans and agents can understand and implement as another layer of abstraction. I don't think that goes away entirely.

anonymid

The point of a framework is to provide structure - a uniform pattern. A shared language. A way of thinking about the problem space. Maybe a shared set of chunks in congitive science parlance. I think how you handle composition, state, network, routing, etc is also fundamentally a part of the framework - it's not just the view layer. My take on this is vamp: https://dlants.me/vamp.html I've been using it with joy on all of my side projects, and feel quite miserable when I return to react.

socketcluster

Frameworks matter, but they should be focused on minimizing the amount and complexity of code per feature. The more feature-dense your code is, the less unnecessary hurdles and complexity, the more reliable your software is and the easier to extend and maintain. The more code can fit into the LLM's context window, the more complex your application can become. I built my own framework which is declarative HTML web components with a serverless backend (similar to Firebase but optimized for AI so that the AI can interact with the control panel) and it's so easy to create new features. It's just pure UX work. Just telling the AI what the problems are. Once fixed, it's fixed for good. By contrast, with standard framework, I have to spend a lot of time debugging coding problems and keep running into regressions and it takes way longer to fix anything. LLMs work really well with custom frameworks provided that they're well documented via agent skills. React doesn't provide optimal abstractions IMO; when building applications, React still makes you duplicate a lot of work and create a lot of custom components. If you really think about the essence of a web UI; it's just containers with lists of records, single records, single fields of specific resources, forms... And each one requires access control rules which should be enforced by the backend; ideally in a declarative way so that it's easy to audit.

sznio

they matter even more. the ai agent is forced to follow some kind of structure you can comprehend. without a framework you don't even have an idea how to refactor this LLM ball of mud

cadamsdotcom

Frameworks, linters, compilers.. they contain codified lessons you'd be silly to not leverage in your work - agentic or otherwise. Using what others have built before you helps you get there faster. Making your own framework is great if you're in no hurry at all - maybe you want to learn, or maybe that's part of what you're selling. For everyone else, use the approach that gives you the most leverage.

gieksosz

It would be great of AI could surface some learnings/pain points from its daily work in a centralised fashion, just like humans sometimes do. This leads to development of good libraries and frameworks. Right now AI just leads to many siloed sessions that keep solving and resolving same problems in isolation.

andrewmlevy

To refine this further, I think we can more confidently say cross-platform frameworks do not matter anymore.

hypfer

Put into 4chan lingo, the thing can IMO be reduced to > Inflammatory Headline > Time-wasting text Which is even more confusing to me, given that multiple people proof-read this, and it still turned out to be this sprawling stream of consciousness? I suppose the charitable interpretation is "engineer trying to make sense of the noise that is AI hype and marketing", but it reads to me more of a hexdump of a checkpoint in that process, instead of an actual result. It would do a lot better with a different headline I think. Like "I've been thinking about things people say about AI and frameworks" or similar. Something that is clear not not reproduce the noise the author (apparently?) tries to calm and cut through.