Having that working base that agents can then customize from is a great approach because you get some of the brownfield benefits where there are established patterns that it can continue to follow. This is often much faster and predictable compared to starting from scratch, where even though agentic development is fast you need to have a true dev mindset and think about everything.
That's the path I've been on with my Dropbox alternative [1]. The 80% is the fast core that focus on file management, the remaining 20% is coming via plugins which implement one of core interfaces so you can handle your own storage, authorisation, authentication, custom apps to handle file types, ... Fun fact, there is 10x more code in the various plugins [2] catering to everything than the core code that was supposed to be the 80%, unsurprisingly everyone needed a different 20%. Plus I find it cool that the guy who needed a gobd compliant log system that have ton of properties to keep auditors happy enforcing hash chained signed with rfc3161 does not contribute to making the system shittier for everyone else
I am currently building this vision with AliaJS (platform engineering tool), where the solid base for the platform will be ERPNext, I agree with the author, we can be flexible on solid bases, it just needs to be more open (not SAP) so we can iterate faster.
Pi is a great example of this. I've used it as the basis for a fleet of agents I'm running on my server, but rather than using the Pi TUI I run it in headless-mode and have extended it to use XMPP as its communication layer so I can use any device with the same sessions, and so agents can talk to each other.
The Pi harness is built to be extended like this, and it's a joy to work with.
He is not hiding that he was wrong. So am fine with that, as my bet is based on reading many of such predictions and take a conclusion for myself. I take these as are opinions backed with some observations.
Agree with this approach. Am building tools around the same concept
80% solid base and rest of for the custom business logic. https://github.com/GoPlasmatic/Orion
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive
[2] https://www.filestash.app/docs/plugin
The Pi harness is built to be extended like this, and it's a joy to work with.