Jacob Rockowitz Cuts Back Agent Guidance in AI-Assisted Drupal Workflow

Newer coding models prompted Webform module maintainer Jacob Rockowitz to delete his existing AGENTS.md file and skills directory and rebuild his Drupal development setup with less agent guidance. In his 14 August 2026 LinkedIn article Vibing Drupal: Losing my skills, Jacob says he reconsidered how much initial context coding agents needed after switching to newer OpenAI models with Codex and OpenCode as his development harnesses. Agent skills and AGENTS.md files provide instructions, documentation and workflows intended to guide coding agents through development tasks.

Jacob says improved planning capabilities made the Superpowers skill less necessary because newer models could generate plans, tasks and subagent workflows without that additional instruction layer. He also removed AI Best Practices for Drupal and says he did not observe a significant decline in code quality, although he still considers those skills useful for older and cheaper models. His only installed skill is Matt Glaman's Drupal.org CLI skill, while he separately maintains custom agent skills for workflows around his contributed projects. He continues to require AI-assisted commits, tickets and comments to be identified as AI-assisted and to require his review before code is committed or pushed and before tickets or comments are submitted.

The article also addresses what Jacob describes as the more personal question of losing programming skills. He says agentic coding can reduce direct practice in problem-solving, coding, understanding and debugging while increasing the emphasis on thinking, planning and building complex applications. Using Webform as an example, he says he does not expect to manually code another project of comparable complexity but can imagine using AI to plan and build a future version. He also describes keeping project documentation accurate, current and close to the code as increasingly important while AI-assisted development practices continue to change.