Boy oh boy can I tell that people have still not internalized this. Yes, your HTTP proxy with a list of features as long as my arm would have been impressive 5 years ago, at least on some level. Today, I can prompt it into existence as easily as you did, and if I am prompting it into existence I can build a custom one with just the features I need, that integrates into my logging & metrics, etc., and perhaps most importantly, I can literally do that more quickly than I can evaluate your project. AI has eliminated the space of open source projects where evaluation of your project takes longer than prompting it into existence does for me.

I feel that doing the job with the fewest lines of code, is best.

I also believe in focused/pure scope. If I write a type or API to do a job, then it should do that job, and only that job. If I want to add functionality that is out-of-scope, then I’ll often write another type, instead of adding it to the existing one. Making this type of decision is always fraught.

But, like in all things, it depends. Sometimes, reducing the overhead of things like setup and testing is a good reason to not introduce a whole new resource, but I should make it a point to document the reason for the incongruity.

This is especially true, when designing user interface. I’ve found that, usually (not all the time, though), less is more.

Josef Albers is known (amongst other things), for the quote “Sometimes, in design, one plus one is three or more.”.

Then build up again from scratch. Likely you will in fact put a fence here or there—but of course you'll know with certainty why it is there. (And more times than not, there will be fewer fences when you are done.)

[1] Naming this for a friend who taught me about fence razing.

But also as a user I fork them for personally desired changes. Even keeping everything working with upstream is low cost these days.

> Suppose you had a pull request for SQLite. "Hey, I've got this new feature for SQLite. Here's the pull request." When you want me to pull that into the tree, you say, "Oh, it's free."

> No, it's not free. What you're doing is asking me - you've got this cool feature, and you want me to maintain it for you, to document it for you, to test it for you, to maintain it for you for the next twenty-five years. That's not free.

> Linus Torvalds is famous for saying there's free as in beer and free as in speech. But there's another kind of freedom: free as in puppies. "Oh look, I've got a free puppy for you." You see where this is going?

> A pull request is a free puppy. And then you've just got a kennel full of puppies at the end of the day. And you can't just throw them out - you're morally obligated to take care of them for their natural life.

> I don't want any free puppies.

source: https://youtu.be/x8_ZZhRL3YU?t=1715

Oh, and integration tests to check that the problem doesn't recur when the fence is replaced.

The corollary is design your open source libraries so they're obvious enough that the chesterton's gaps are obvious. Anytime an AI tool submits something that breaks your expectation of things not being necessary it usually highlights that there's a missing gap in the explanation of what is necessary.