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Frameworks are implementation details now. The details still matter

With coding agents, I review diffs more than I write code. That doesn’t make framework knowledge irrelevant. It moves it into guardrails, review and catching drift.

A video I watched recently argued that, because of how coding agents work now, frameworks like Svelte or React are becoming implementation details. You give the agent its instructions, it does the work, and you review the pull request and the diff.

I’ve felt that since the start of this year. It’s how I work most of the time now. And it sounds a lot like vibe coding, right?

It isn’t. Because I still care, a lot, about the details.

The details the model sails through

LLMs will happily sail straight past things like these and put in their own implementation:

  • Fetching data in a component, client-side, when SvelteKit has load functions and remote functions for exactly that.
  • Solving a date formatting problem locally, in whatever file it happens to be in, instead of using the shared function.
  • Using $effect to manage state. In a previous team, “don’t use effects” was practically a running joke, because any PR I saw with one in it, I’d object to until I understood the use case. $effect is an escape hatch, for third-party libraries, analytics and the like. It’s not for managing state, and LLMs use it to manage state all the time.

The code works. It’s just the wrong code, and a model can produce valid Svelte that’s still the wrong Svelte.

Where the expertise went

Before, the skill was syntax and being able to type fast. Now it’s being able to catch drift in what an LLM produces, understand where it’s going wrong, and correct it.

Better still is having guardrails in place so it can’t get there in the first place. In my own agent setup, $effect is just blocked. The model can’t write it. On client projects, the same judgement goes into boundary checks that fail the build.

I don’t get to write a great deal of code any more. I still have to understand how things fit together, and the best way for that to happen. We’re all working in abstractions now. We still need to be keen on the details of how things are done.

What a team gets from this

Framework expertise hasn’t gone away. It’s moved into instructions, architecture, review and guardrails. When you hire someone to lead AI-assisted delivery, that’s the expertise you’re paying for.

If your team is shipping a lot of plausible code and you’re not sure it’s the right code, let’s talk.