CLI Roadmap

[aem]

The last ~month where I've been unable to contribute time to Blitz due to personal commitments and work responsibilities has led to an obvious gap in our governance model for the CLI - all of the roadmap lives in my head! Let's use this discussion as a way to plan some future feature work, known issues that need to be fixed, and then we can start to assign work. I'm hoping in the coming weeks I'll be able to get back to work on launching recipes and improving our Prisma integration in preparation for planning around our plugin system, and in the meantime we can use this discussion as a way to divvy up the remaining work on smaller features that will still be important for the developer experience.

Here's my rough idea of prioritization for short-term work that we should be able to complete to improve the CLI experience. Issues left off of here aren't unimportant, they just (in my estimation) don't meet the ideal ratio of effort to value for our high priority list

Disruptive Bugs & Rough Edges

1. Re-generating existing model duplicates model in Prisma schema
2. JSX conditionals as first-class citizen in templates (#698)
3. Cross-terminal model generation syntax (#724)

Features

1. MDX Recipes (ideally integrated with Gatsby stack) Finalize TS recipes API, write some Blitz-owned recipes, and release to public @aem (PR: [legacy-framework] Improved API for defining Blitz Recipes #770)
2. Model-aware page generation (#259)
   1. For a reasonably useful version of this we'd need to implement loops in the templating language. This introduces an interesting problem because the goal of our custom templating language is that it's valid TS, which means we'll need to support native for loops or something like process.env.__objList__.map(fnThatReturnsJsx) similar to how variable replacement currently works. I think in order to support this we should extract the templating engine into its own package (and maybe eventually release it as a standalone, non-Blitz package).
3. Robust unit testing in app template (#277)
4. Ejected templates (#236)
5. blitz routes (#240)
6. blitz update
   1. We should be able to use recipes to write a blitz update command which will proxy to something like blitz install blitz@1.0.0 and then the recipes directory can just have install scripts. Ideally it would fetch all versions between your current version and latest and run the recipes in order to ensure you don't miss any breaking changes

[aem]

Worth calling out here that even though the issues are somewhat documented, implementation ideas and general architecture stuff still mostly lives in my head, so let's use this discussion as a way to talk through those things before we spend time on implementation. This can then also serve as a central place to point people when they ask about our design decisions in the CLI.