I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.
At least there was some genuine effort involved there. What I find most disheartening about the current wave of AI-generated projects is that there's often very little personal involvement - someone had a general idea and asked Claude (or whatever) to implement it for them, and the results are much more representative of the AI agent's tendencies than the author's intent.
