What was surprising is that it wasn't just about catching errors after generation. The model seemed to anticipate the constraints and generated cleaner code from the start. My working theory is that strict, typed configs give the model a cleaner context to reason from, almost like telling it what good code looks like before it starts.

The piece I still haven't solved: even with perfect guardrails per file, models frequently lose track of cross-file invariants. You can have every individual component lint-clean and still end up with a codebase that silently breaks when components interact. That seems like the next layer of the problem.

In my experience, the bottleneck has always been backend dev and testing.

I was hoping "tooling" meant faster testing, not yet another layer of frontend dev. Frontend dev is pretty fast even when done completely by hand for the last decade or so. I have and have also seen others livecode on 15 minute calls with stakeholders or QA to mock some UI or debug. I've seen people deliver the final results from that meeting just a couple of hours later. I say this as in, that's what's going to prod minus some very specific edge case bugs that might even get argued away and never fixed.

Not trying to be defensive of pure human coding skills, but sometimes I wonder if we've rolled back expectations in the past few years. All this recent stuff seems even more complicated and more error prone, and frontend is already those things.

The upshot of all these projects to make JS tools faster is a fractured ecosystem. Who if given the choice would honestly want to try to maintain Javascript tools written in a mixture of Rust and Go? Already we've seemingly committed to having a big schism in the middle. And the new tools don't replace the old ones, so to own your tools you'll need to make Rust, Go, and JS all work together using a mix of clean modern technology and shims into horribly legacy technology. We have to maintain everything, old and new, because it's all still critical, engineers have to learn everything, old and new, because it's all still critical.

All I really see is an explosion of complexity.