Get rid of external packages

If you've ever managed large code bases for a long time you would know how problematic external open source code can be sometimes. Sometimes you wish you hadn't used it at all. You are constantly playing chase. Either a security vulnerability is identified or a major version comes up. A migration is needed. A breaking change is around the corner. This problem is doubly intense in Javascript ecosystem. Where open source packages are aplenty and package management is trivial.

We use third-party packages so we don't have to write, test, and maintain code. More often than not that's only partially true. You only avoid writing code. Testing and maintenance are still important.

Once I spent two months upgrading a React version. Once three weeks updating a material ui version. Another time many weeks upgrading a Jest version and so on and so forth. I've been through dependency hell many times. So much so that I even thought of opening an agency to do major package upgrades for companies.

Now that LLMs are here, I suggest getting rid of most third-party packages. Let LLM generate precisely the code we want. It can do so quickly. We won't have to maintain huge packages again.

Custom code will be leaner with a smaller footprint and not prone to dependency hell and security issues. We won't be playing chase all the time.

If you need an accordion, prompt your favorite LLM and get your accordion instead of doing npm i react-accordion.

Some packages are still important. You can't get AI to spin up the entire Vue or Svelte library. But we can go back to writing lean code. Thanks to AI.