I've been building lots of apps by using LLMs and Agents. I'm currently up to about 17 tools, utilities and demos over the duration of a couple of weeks. I build them for me and because tools like Replit have enabled me during my small spots of free time to build fully working sites and apps that solve the immediate problem that I have. I've felt incredibly productive.
I've a hypothesis that something like these Agents will be how we build software in the future, so as I build these apps I try to never adjust the output, I want to see how far that I can get with the machine creating all the code and so see how far away we are from this future.
Replit has been my current tool of choice because while it's a normal IDE, the "Progress" view gives me a diff of all the changes it has made for the current prompt. Because in the most part I know what I am doing I can quickly see if the software has made an error and correct it.
As I watch the code pass by in Replit, I'd noticed that the Python and JavaScript it produced was vanilla and it would frequently duplicate the logic on different screens for the same functionality. It certainly wasn't that type of code that I would craft. I probably would have planned for the removal of repetition. I would have planned for the ability to extend and inherit. I would have planned for testability. Other than the Flask backend, it didn't use any other Frameworks.
Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software.
I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?
I dunno know, but it will be a lot of fun to find out.
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.
I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me directly, please feel free to book a consultation.
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