Ben McKay

Still haven’t fleshed these thoughts out. But I think it’s extremely important, now more than ever, for you to have an opinionated coding “fence” for your agents. Starter kits are great. But you need a replicable way to build every piece of the tools you create. Opinionated, full-stack, batteries included frameworks like Laravel are fantastic. But I still think they are just a starting point. A fantastic one. But a starting point nonetheless. They help tell agents how to write the code and how to build a fence. But if you already have opinions on what that fence looks like, then the speed you can build things becomes insurmountable. What components look like, how styling works, what patterns in back end code you want, what API patterns might look like, how DX/UX should feel. Frameworks, even batteries-included ones, still have flexibility and freedom. Humans (you) driving that freedom feels so much better than having agents pick those choices.

so, "templates" and "starters" are kinda dead yeah? I swear I wanted to write this about 6 months ago but never got around to it. And now, seems foregone. I never liked them, because there was at least one decision that was annoying to undo. But fine, good for a lot of people. And now, even if there's a good starter, I'm going to point my coding boy at it and say "steal the good parts, jut set it up like I always do. Oh and swap out X for Y while you're at it"