We Have Too Many Frameworks. Why Are Our CLIs Still Opinionated?

#webdev #ai #productivity #javascript

Developers are using various frameworks to build web application. For instance, prominently We use - nextjs, svelte, react for frontend, Express, Fastify for backend, Postgres, MySQL for database and respective providers and preferred package manager and runtime env.

But to setup a web application with their preferred stack they still need to depend on various cli to setup the projects.

But people can just use AI to setup right ?

Yes, but still they need to run various CLI commands to setup the application. They spend at least 30 mins to setup even before to start code.

Average CLI commands involved to setup application with Nextjs, Express, Nodejs, PgSQL,prisma, turborepo, clerk, supabase.

# Create monorepo
npx create-turbo@latest

# Create Next.js app
npx create-next-app@latest apps/web

# Initialize backend
mkdir apps/api
cd apps/api
npm init -y

# Install Express
npm install express

# Initialize TypeScript
npx tsc --init

# Initialize Prisma
npm install prisma @prisma/client
npx prisma init

# Start PostgreSQL (Docker)
docker compose up -d postgres

# Supabase setup
supabase login
supabase init
supabase link

# Prisma migration & client generation
npx prisma migrate dev
npx prisma generate

# Clerk setup
npx clerk login
npx clerk setup

# Install remaining dependencies
npm install

# Start development
turbo dev