Comment by noosphr
6 hours ago
I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money.
Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.
The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.
Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight.
I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree.
Its such a common junior move. Ugh.
Experienced engineers know how to pull in just what they need from lodash. But ... most experienced engineers I know & work with don't bother with it. Javascript includes almost everything you need these days anyway. And when it doesn't, the kind of helper functions lodash provides are usually about 4 lines of code to write yourself. Much better to do that manually rather than pull in some 70kb dependency.
Your first sentence cheers that we're moving from NPM micropackages to LLM-generated code, and then you say this will result in people having to learn to code again.
I don't see how the conclusion follows from this.
There will be many LLM-generated functions purporting to do the same thing, and a bug in one of them that gets fixed means only one project gets fixed instead of every project using an NPM package as a dependency.
Now you got vibe coder
I don't quite understand your argument. Wasn't the post about how users might replace transparent dependencies with transparent LLM drop-ins? I don't see how having an LLM to do the same job would enable someone to learn more. They're probably the kind of person who will ask the LLM to perform a refactor when problems arise, so they won't learn that much through osmosis.