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KID-joker
KID-joker

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I finally shipped the plugin I'd been putting off for years. Then I started questioning why I built it.

A few days ago I checked off something that had been sitting in my todo list for a long time.

It's a small develop plugin called unplugin-drop-committed. It removes method calls like console.log from your code during development — but only the ones that have been committed to Git. Your uncommitted lines are safe.

The idea came from a real frustration: a colleague had left console.log calls inside polling loops. The browser console was unusable. I didn't want to ban console.log globally — I just wanted the committed noise gone.

Simple enough concept. I had the idea. I never built it.


Why it sat there so long

I care deeply about DX tooling. Probably more than is professionally sensible. I've filtered job opportunities based on whether I'd be working on developer experience. I think it's underrated craft — the invisible layer that makes other developers' days slightly less painful.

But DX is almost always low priority at work. There's always a feature to ship, a bug to fix, a deadline to hit. The DX improvements I want to make get pushed to "later". Later becomes the weekend. The weekend fills up. The todo list grows.

unplugin-drop-committed sat there for a long time. Not because it was hard. Because I never had the uninterrupted time to start.


How AI changed that

I used Claude to help me build it. I want to be clear about what that means: the ideas, the design, the four removal modes — those were mine. What AI gave me was momentum. It handled the boilerplate, suggested approaches I hadn't considered, and kept me from getting stuck on implementation details that would have cost me a whole evening.

It took a fraction of the time I expected. I finally crossed something off the list.

For someone like me — someone with a backlog of DX ideas and a shortage of free hours — AI is genuinely liberating. It's not replacing my thinking. It's removing the friction that was keeping my thinking from becoming real things.


The question that followed

The satisfaction lasted maybe ten minutes.

Then I started thinking about who would actually use this.

AI-assisted development is changing how code gets written. AI agents don't forget to delete their console.log calls the way humans do — or if they produce noise, it's a different kind. The problem this plugin solves is a human problem, shaped by human habits.

I asked Claude how I should position the plugin. It suggested: "unplugin-drop-committed helps AI coding agents stay focused — keeping debug output isolated to the module being worked on."

That's… not wrong. It's actually an interesting reframe. But it also felt like I was watching my motivation quietly shift from "making developers' lives better" to "making AI agents' workflows cleaner."

DX. AX. Developer Experience. Agent Experience.

I'm not sure when the transition happened, or if it already has.


What I actually believe

I don't think DX is dead. I think the audience is changing, and the best DX tools will be the ones that serve both humans and the agents working alongside them.

I also think there's something worth preserving about caring whether the developer console is readable. Whether the hot reload feels instant. Whether configuration is intuitive. These things still matter, even if fewer people are writing the code by hand.

And I'm going to keep building these tools. AI gave me back the time to do it. I'd rather use that time on the things I actually care about than spend it wondering whether caring still counts.


If you want to try it:

https://github.com/KID-joker/unplugin-drop-committed

Four modes: strict (committed lines), file (committed files), user (other authors), time (older than N days/months). Vite, Webpack, Rollup, Rspack. Vue and Svelte script blocks included.

I'd genuinely like to know: do you think DX tooling still matters the same way it did two years ago?

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