I am dealing with similar issues in npm now, as someone who is touching Node dev again. The number of deprecations drives me nuts. Seems like I’m on a treadmill of updating APIs just to have the same functionality as before.
It’s not always possible to be so minimal, but I view every dependency as lugging around a huge lurking liability, so the benefit it brings had better far outweigh that big liability.
So far, I’ve only had one painful dependency upgrade in 5 years, and that was Tailwind 3-4. It wasn’t too painful, but it was painful enough to make me glad it’s not a regular occurrence.
The constant update cycles of some libraries (hello Router) is problematic in itself, but there's too many fashionable things that sound very good in theory but end up being a huge problem when used in fast-moving projects, like headless UI libraries.
Well, I always thought it is the key in every kind of development, JS or else.
On that subject, ironically code gen by ai for ai related work is often least reliable due to fast churn. Langchain is a good example of this and also kind of funny, they suggest / integrate gritql for deterministic code transforms rather than using AI directly: https://python.langchain.com/docs/versions/v0_3/.
Overall.. mastering things like gritql, ast grep, and CST tools for code transforms still pays off. For large code bases, No matter how good AI gets, it is probably better to get them to use formal/deterministic tools like these rather than trust them with code transformations more directly and just hope for the best..
As good as Rust is, I still feel there needs to be a "high-low" strategy for most biz/game code. You want to be able to depend on your low level abstractions, while constantly changing up how you fit them together.
eg: https://docs.openrewrite.org/recipes/java/migrate/joda/jodat...
I occasionally notice libraries or frameworks including OpenRewrite rules in their releases. I've never tried it, though!
It is very strange that more mainstream languages do not have such features (and I am not talking about 3rd party tools; in Modelica conversions are part of the language spec).
@Deprecated(replaceWith = "new expression")