And this highlights my frustration. I don’t want to have this debate. The tool should allow its operator to set whatever level of strictness or purity they want for their project. Fossil already offers a million settings. Add another and make me turn on “dangerously-unsafe-rebase” to get the feature if need be.
Though I just vented in another comment about fossil, I'll admit that all of my experience was in the pre-agentic era. Since an agent won't be as easily annoyed (heck, it happily belts out sqlite's tedious schema alternation dance without pause), I'm curious to try pointing it fossil as the scm for a project.
Fossil is extremely frustrating to me. There are so many parts that I'm drawn to, but then are there showstoppers that prevent real adoption (by me). I've used it in earnest a number of times. Their immutability stance is at the root of the problems. Lack of rebase is most infamous, but you can't even edit a ticket description! Make a typo or error in the description, and you're expected to append more notes, or delete and recreate the ticket.
I really love the idea of a powerful, shrink-wrapped scm + ticketing etc. system, and I'm a sqlite fan, but fossil hasn't worked out for me.
For me, I know backend development really well, and HTML/CSS passably. HTMX has been much lower friction for me than learning JS frameworks, which tbh I didn't really enjoy, and they were constantly changing. But now, I had mostly leave the JS to Claude, and the HTMX draw has diminished a bit.
I don’t feel like the learning curve has shifted dramatically for mainstream development. Besides generics—which tend to not show up that often in app code even now—I can’t think of any substantial language change since I Iearned it in 2014. (Well, modules, but that’s more tooling.) Where I do see the shock is jumping to def of a std lib function and landing in indecipherable type soup.
I've lapsed my subscription because it has, in my opinion, gotten a bit too clickbait-y and many of the articles are sort of thin rehashes of already covered material. It is still better than most, but also fairly pricy.
Tone/style bit aside, a real problem is length. Scroll waaay down and look at most older updates and see how brief and too-the-point they were. Often they look rushed, some essential links, and that’s it. Fine by me! That’s the real state of things… people usually don’t want to write bc it’s a lot of effort.
I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
I never did get used to the Chezmoi workflow. `chezmoi edit` never became muscle memory, and I was constant finding myself resolving diffs and what not.
40+ year glasses wearer here who learned this perhaps only 10 years ago, I think this is the correct way. The one annoying part is the difference that the glass coating makes. The water just falls off some of my glasses with barely as much as a light tap. Others length tend to hang onto the water in beads, so I have to actually wait for it to dry (or walk around with water spots, which I also do when impatient...)
Seeing my own kids (teens) go through some of this, I'm becoming slightly less pessimistic as it all shakes out. Among their peer groups there does seem to be an opinion forming that sure, anyone can just ask ChatGPT for quick answers on assignments, but actually knowing stuff is a bit of a "flex" that's respected.
Can definitely relate. It is no more complicated than I really enjoyed designing and writing code by hand, and get very little joy out of agentic processes. I use the tools and see the velocity increase, but it has just become… bland work. I completely get others’ excitement around the tools and the newfound “super powers”, but it hasn’t much resonated with me.
That’s ok! I was fascinated by coding when many others weren’t and found a great career as a result. A different cohort will love Development 2.0.
Impossible to tell! Even when I have established patterns, I do take alternatives for a spin… usually a solid week to give them a chance. Most times I’m just reaffirming that I like what I’ve got, but I do occasionally discover features that are new/interesting.
It’s funny… my initial reaction to your comment was that it’s a bit persnickety to expect that. However, I’m coming around to agreeing. I recently spent a non-trivial amount of time responding to a PR into one of my projects. I did have a sense it was mostly AI, but the changes were reasonable with a bit of adjustment. Wrote some feedback and guidance for the first time contributor and bam, they closed the PR, haven’t heard back.
Here's my optimistic take: the fundamental things that spark joy about learning a novel algorithm, pattern, technique, etc. haven't gone anywhere, and there's no reason to think those things won't continue to be interesting. Furthermore, it seems like reading code isn't going anywhere too soon, and that definitely benefits from clean code. It follows that someone who can actually recognize clean from spaghetti, and tell the LLM to refactor it into XYZ style, is going to be relatively more valuable.
Random side note: my teen son has grown up with iPhone-level tech, yet likes and finds my old Casio F91 watch very interesting. I still have faith :)
I doubt it. But I keep my own encrypted backup anyway (as I did with 1P, too), so realistically only the most recently added/updated passwords are at risk.
I think a core reason (besides not knowing jj exists), is the framing that there is a choice that has to be made, or a switch that has to occur. It is, instead, additive. I have Sublime Merge (GUI git client) and jj both looking at my git repo all day. Zed's git stuff is watching it too.
jj is sort of a bag of git tricks for me that I use when needed. It's no different than some things being easier with the git CLI vs others being easier in Sublime. I'll be at a stage where my committing/branching/rearranging wants are something that jj nails perfectly, and I do those there. As far at the other tools are concerned, I just did a bunch of sophisticated git operations.
The "colocated with git" capability of jj is probably it's most amazing feature tbh, and is key to any sort of adoption.
I’m completely not in this space but your comment had me wondering: are there digital cube faces? That is, a real physical cube but with faces that can instantly be set to a given color?
Same. I also had one when the school mail-order book fair offered a diary with a padlock on it. I wasn't even into writing, but I thought a locking book was so cool. 8 weeks later it shows up and turns out to be just a regular hardcover diary with the cover printed to look like a padlock.
Gotcha. Is there a request in for this? The team seems incredibly productive (I'm sometimes offered multiple updates per day), and my completely uninformed and naive take is that this probably wouldn't be too big of a lift, relative to the stuff I'm seeing them ship regularly.