This post is excellent, and accurately describes my experience writing pcons (pcons.org) as a side project. I was one of the original developers of SCons and have wanted to rebuild it better for more than a decade. All the same roadblocks Maganti describes kept me from starting it, and Claude Opus 4.6 suddenly opened the door, and now it's live and people are starting to use it as a cmake or scons replacement. My experience over the last few months mirror Maganti's in many ways: ease of refactoring, investigating many more design ideas, getting frustrated with blind alleys and its not understanding the big picture, and ultimately getting a product I'm proud of.

Vision, taste and good judgment are going to be the key skills for software developers from now on.