This is interesting, because I've been going the other way: Using coding agents to write MORE abstraction layers. This is because I realized that, just like humans, in fact even more so, language models struggle to keep the whole stack in mind at once. See for yourself: Try having your agent write a CRUD app in Ruby or Python (no Rails, no Django), and then try it again with Rails or Django. It'll be a lot more productive and error-free the second time.

However, I think I understand where the author's coming from based on this line:

> I’ve been building a product from the ground up. Not the “I spun up a Next.js template” kind of ground up

Next.JS is the pinnacle of JavaScript-on-the-backend frameworks, and it's kind of pathetic compared to what Rails or Django give you. You still have a lot of thinking to do, so I posit (as I have for some time) that using Next.JS vs using NodeJS directly gives humans very little productivity boost. I think people just know that frameworks are a good thing in general, and never realized that the JavaScript offerings weren't that powerful.