scottfalconer

I don't think websites are going away, any more than facebook "killed the website" 20 years ago.

We will need to make everything accessible to agents and humans though because you'll never know if you're dealing with a human, an agent, a human driving an agent, or an agent driving a human.

I use voice mode a lot for product / architecture planning and dev - but the fundamentals are still the same. Have well defined requirements / specs / plans, understand the tradeoffs and edge cases before any real dev starts, have standards and tests checked by systems that the agent can't talk it's away around etc.

I'm less concerned about the syntax of the code these days and focus more on the overall architecture.

i.e. going on a walk with voice mode and saying "lets walk through all of the tests one-by-one, for each lets review what it does, why we need it, and how it covers something that could actually happen in the real world.

Because agents can build things, but fortunately for us humans, there's still room for making sure the "right" thing gets built.

i.e. why read a book written by a human when an agent can write one? Why buy a painting that could have been printed.

One of the benefits of open-source and frameworks is they're made up of battle-tested decisions by a lot of people with real skin in the game for a long time. Yes an agent will often solve your problem, and will solve it correctly - as asked, but often a better answer is found by stepping back, evaluating the fundamentals, checking other perspectives, challenging assumptions, and having an opinion.

I don't personally use Ruby on Rails, but there's a strong benefit from a framework or system that has been pressure tested in the real world with a lot of eyes on it - especially open-source ones that are the result of the accumulated judgement of many users.

Many solutions that seem obvious are less than so after a bit of prodding - but without that sort of discussion or pressure both humans and agents will often land on the thing that works first.

Where it tends to really matter these days are on the opinionated decisions... i.e. the trade-offs, things that can't be clearly validated etc.

So in the end I think we'll find that these sorts of frameworks etc. will continue to be, and possibly become more important - when your use case matches the intent and goals of the tool. This opinion differentiator is likely also the thing that combats the current issue of proliferation of quickly-built tools that more or less do the same thing.

> which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions

This isn't correct. Yes it was true from Drupal 7 to 8, but one of the primary goals of that change was so that every major version after could have seamless in-place upgrades - which they have. Yes there's deprecated code etc. that you might run into in contrib. or custom modules, but the site upgrades themselves are easier than ever.

That trial form is if you want a desktop installer from the Drupal Association. You can still install Drupal CMS directly with no form by clicking the "Download the Composer package instead" button next to that.

> core properties of web infrastructure

That seems more like an implementation opinion vs. a core property.

Agree that it was a pain to keep up with sometimes, but if software doesn't evolve over a 25 year timespan - it's likely going to be stuck in the past.

The reason Drupal can do what it does today is because of this willingness to rebuild - otherwise it'd just be a CMS that solves problems from the early 2000s.

I'd argue that content written by non-humans makes this even more important. You still likely have a need for a publishing / review workflow & attribution and a way to ensure standards are enforced and not just left to the end-user's own judgement.

Separating delivery from content management also reinforces this. Set up a governed content / user workflow and then let an agent focus on just the presentation after pulling in the content. I'd say this extends well beyond rest as well. A user interacting with something like a voice assistant in an agent might actually be using many interfaces at once (mcp from the assistant, HTML in a card, WebMCP alongside the HTML, browser open on another device for the human.) When that happens you want one canoninical system for the content.

Why wouldn't the makers of something be able to state their opinion on it? Especially an open, collaborative project with many people, and opinions, behind it.

If you disagree with the sentiment, it'd be interesting to here why - that's the sort of information that's extremely useful for makers.

I'd say no, at least to start - there's an inherent cost in using a CMS a framework etc. If what you're building is simple enough that a flat file hosted on cloudflare etc, works, then start there.

Once you find you do have a need for something more complex (i.e. you have a team, want to give agents governed access etc), then it's pretty easy to go from a flat file to something more complex.

yeah, that's the double-edged sword. Drupal can do what it does today because it continually rebuilt it's foundation - but at the same time that sort of movement did cause a lot of pain along the way. At the same time, in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with - if not the standard everyone may need to adopt.

also the best code is usually less code, and frameworks can be really helpful there.

yes, but in my opinion it's not a new strategy.

From a site building perspective:

The problems agents bring to the table are the same problems that UGC brought to the table - new scale, untrusted users, an increased need for governance.

From a user experience perspective:

You can't ever really know if it's a human, an agent, a human driving an agent, or an agent driving a human - so stick to information architecture and accessibility best practices.

beyond that though, we're in new territory when it comes to change / scale / security / etc, so if there is a strategy it'll be out of date tomorrow.

It's the inverted pyramid that has always been sort of Drupal's niche... a small number of all sites, but a large percent of the largest sites in the world.

And fortunately those of us in tech, the amount of software in the world is exploding so all those lanes are getting bigger, even within their niche.