There are two open questions about the future of software engineering:
- Do frameworks still matter?
- Does my work still matter?
While it’s hard to predict what things will look like in a year or two from now, in this moment, my answer to both is: Attention. The time spent on a task in the past and present helps us build great things.
Sure, an agent can vibe code a UI framework, or a linter, or a bundler. But you still have to spend your time prompting an agent to build new features and use your attention to verify it actually does what you want it to do. That’s exhausting, and because attention is finite, it’s expensive too. This is ok for a small project run by one person, but doesn’t scale to large organizations and millions of lines of code.
Right now - and to be clear this might, and likely will, change in the future - I prefer to use frameworks that are established, feature-rich and fast. Tools that keep getting better because they are maintained by a group of people who spend their attention so I don’t have to. There is also incredible value in the attention spent by a community on a specific tool.
There are some things that are changing, though. It’s dramatically easier to maintain custom forks of basically anything. It’s easier to rewrite stuff in another language. In many ways it feels like we are finally fulfilling the true promise of open source: Fork a project and keep maintaining your version forever. Maybe we don’t need plugin systems in software anymore - just fork it! But all that still needs your attention.