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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I've seen plenty of projects where people had that attitude except the thing they saw as time-wasting was the CI and Unit Tests.

Those projects weren't even dumpster fires.

You can, genuinely, do without all of this stuff — but they're just helpful tools, not silver bullets or the only way to do things, but helpful.

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I like unit tests, and I would happily adopt a CI system if my project included non-Python code and had to build multiple wheels. But formatting code properly in my editor is second nature by now; the functions I write are typically so short that it'd be hard to do anything a linter would object to; and type-checking doesn't just introduce busy-work, it works against part of the reason I'm using Python in the first place. I actively don't want to tell people not to call my code with a perfectly compatible type just because I hadn't considered it as within the range of possible compatible types.

Never said it was a silver bullet. I said I would rather people concentrate on more important things than configuring a linter. Half the time this stuff gives you weird errors that don't make a lot of sense (especially with JavaScript/TypeScript), sometimes you are literally making the compiler warning go away because there is literally nothing wrong with the code.

I do use eslint/prettier btw, but other collegues can never seem to get this working so I've just given up on it and then fix the linter issues whenever I come across them.

> Never said it was a silver bullet.

Between this and your other comment*, you seem to be simultaneously expecting me to be more and also less literal in how I read your comments.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42786325

I expect you to be able to use your brain to distinguish obvious hyperbole (it was absolutely obvious) with a matter of fact statement.

I am starting to suspect that this playing dumb is entirely disingenuous.

You've never met people who take what you now call obvious hyperbole absolutely seriously and literally?

I guess you're going to continue to get surprised by how often you get criticised in this specific way, by many, many other people.

Hint: when someone doesn't understand you, you were in fact not obvious, no matter what you think — communication is a multiplayer game, not a single-player endeavour.

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