Engineer rewrites side project removing 246 dependencies

An engineer used an AI coding agent to completely remove all 246 gems and npm package dependencies from a hotel management side project in under five hours. The agent reimplemented the necessary slices of the frameworks and libraries from scratch, resulting in a smaller codebase, faster build and boot times, and a minor net addition of 796 lines of code. The author notes that while this eliminated the dependency supply-chain risk, it also transferred the maintenance burden of those components directly to their own codebase. Open article →