There are different kinds of developer. Some will find their joy through building fast, they tend to love LLMs. Some love the art of writing code; they don't tend to love LLMs. And there are others too. Those that enjoy fully understanding a piece of code can find the process deeply draining, while those that look at things from a system level find the LLM frees them from the details.
All kinds are needed for different types of work, and it's not discussed enough that LLMs make some developer archetypes more effective and others more exhausted. Great article.
At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been.
I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).
I agree that a lot of the noise at the moment is an emotional reaction to LLMs, rather than a dispassionate assessment of how useful they are. It's understandable - they are changing the way we work, and for lots of us (software developers), the reason we chose this career was because we _enjoy_ writing code and solving problems.
As with a lot of issues in today's world, each side is talking past the other. It can simultaneously be true that LLMs make writing code less enjoyable / gratifying, and that LLMs can speed up our work.
A top recommendation along these lines is The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garard; a member of the Scott expedition to the south pole, which goes into detail of his winter journey (which the title refers to). One of the best historical adventure books I've read
There's a disincentive to actively block PRs if you don't want your coworkers to think you are a bad colleague / not on their side. So you often see suboptimal code making its way to production. This has a worse effect the more terrible engineers there are.
It gives you control over the output of your program (and as you mention, the exact error code - which probably should be 1 in this instance).
It's often more user friendly to print a short human-readable message (or nothing) than to dump a huge stack trace. YMMV, if this is an internal dev tool then the opposite might be true!
I really like the short and visually descriptive layout of this article. It clearly conveys the message. I'm not in agreement that toasts are always bad though.
It can be useful to follow an expected pattern; users are likely to understand that a toast gives feedback for an action they have taken. Although other ways exist to accomplish this, they will follow different formats depending on the action (by necessity).
As with lots of design, expected patterns change over time. Although they are non-local, toasts are familiar.
All very good and useful points. One additional thing to mention is that as you are querying across the raw data with a data lake(house), performance is fundamentally worse, even if a lot of the marketing material will tell you otherwise. Usually significantly worse than if your data was in a columnar database in practice.
Depending on your use case this may or may not be a problem. For most companies I'd wager that it is a bigger problem than it first appears.
One engineer on their own can only write so much code. As soon as you have two, you have a team, and the team needs to share information. Fundamentally that's what all those meetings are for (and it's a large part of the job of leadership to facilitate that sharing of information as effectively as possible)
This is my final quibble with VSCode as well - except I'm coming from Vim. I've hunted high and low through the settings - if anyone from the VSCode team is reading this, there's not another feature that's more vital to match vim/Emacs utility!
As a Brit I can't help but notice that on every axis, our country appears to be in decline at the moment. Even before Brexit, things hadn't been going well, as this article shows. It's making me seriously consider moving away.
I want to have hope that as a country we can turn around this societal regression, but I fear it's a deeper problem than just the current government. The class system and an unhealthy nostalgia for when we were more important in the world seem to be holding us back.
The effect mentioned started before Brexit, so the link has to be with something else - in the article's conclusion it's a related Tory problem, austerity
Well known anecdotally perhaps, but this is the first time I've seen a major publication link the two issues (possibly I don't read enough of the news). Hopefully we see more like this.