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.
I have a very similar story. I spent many many evenings in my teens learning to “script” with Taran’s Sphere Scripting For Dummies website and .chm file for the Sphere Server UO emulator.
Best part is I didn’t even realise I was programming. In my mind I was just making the game do what I wanted.
We used to gargle water mixed with potassium permanganate as children after cleaning our teeth to see if we did a good enough job. It would colour plaque pink, so it was very obvious if you hadn't cleaned properly!
It's the super terse anonymous function syntax. You could use the slightly more verbose version with named instead of positional params or put a named function in there instead.
More that I don't have to force everything into a single file. I think it's more flexible that way. Let's say one day I work static files into my build process I could chuck them into the same folder where they're relevant to the component.
I had a similar experience. Between the ages of 14-16 I tinkered on my own sphere shard with a friend of mine. I didn't realise what I was doing was programming until I took courses 16-17 and realised what I had been doing the whole time :)
There was one website, Taran's Scripting For Dummies, that was pretty much my bible.
Just a quick comment on the spamfest side of things. Disclaimer that I never got into LoL. I've found over the years playing most of the different MOBAs that when I come into a new one I find it nearly impossible to delineate what is happening in a many-player fight. It only comes after some time playing the game that I'm able to recognise this shade of light in this pattern means this spell is being used, etc. After a point it becomes quite clear what is going on and looks a lot less like a spamfest.
I think the distinction the grandparent made was they would be happy to see the trait in the leader of the country, not that seeing the trait makes a good leader.
If I recall correctly from the last time I had to deal with this, it's the first 3 towns on the Eyre highway in WA coming from the SA border. This[1] suggests there are actually 4.