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Well I tend to think that "Configuration isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing" and I came to have a lot of respect for how configuration works in modern Drupal after having to work on our Drupal early this year.
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> in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with

Easier in terms of effort and time, but it still costs, and it still adds drag.

The fact that I can do housekeeping much more easily with agents doesn’t make me want to do more of it. The whole point is to free up my time, energy, and thinking for things that are more worthwhile, interesting, and value-adding. That’s my mentality both at home and at work.

If you’re building a framework or a library, whether open source or commercial, and you think agentic and AI native development gives you more license for breaking changes and churn because your users can just fix it up with their agents, then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you because that blade cuts on both sides.

If you can keep churning and breaking stuff, then I can get fed up, drop your shit like a hot rock, and build it myself. And I will.

I’ve just rebuilt my personal site from scratch after getting cheesed off with the framework I used and it didn’t take very long. What’s actually taken longer is making all the improvements I would have liked to make but were too much hassle before, so one needs to relearn shipping discipline, but that’s OK.

Same goes at work. Even major stack changes, like migrating database engine, are so much easier. Yes, you still need to be methodical and disciplined - in fact I’d argue agents make that more important than ever in many enterprise contexts - but it is still so much easier. I’m seeing projects left and right that in the old world would have taken weeks or months executed in days or weeks. It’s wild times.

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Why use Drupal at all if the agent can just build things?
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Because agents can build things, but fortunately for us humans, there's still room for making sure the "right" thing gets built.

i.e. why read a book written by a human when an agent can write one? Why buy a painting that could have been printed.

One of the benefits of open-source and frameworks is they're made up of battle-tested decisions by a lot of people with real skin in the game for a long time. Yes an agent will often solve your problem, and will solve it correctly - as asked, but often a better answer is found by stepping back, evaluating the fundamentals, checking other perspectives, challenging assumptions, and having an opinion.

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Having a framework as guardrails (Hah!) for agents is still very powerful, in my experience working with Rails + Claude it works together really well and there's not really a downside compared to doing it completely from scratch.

I'd rather point the agent at and authentication gem and tell it to use that, vs telling it "build authentication, make no mistakes".

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Isn't that an argument for pointing an agent at symfony or laravel, not at drupal?
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I understood the parent comment to mean framework vs. writing everything from scratch, not necessarily about Drupal, Laravel, Symfony. Drupal just came up as it's the thread title. I'd apply that statement to each framework.
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