I'm off two minds. On the one side, there is far too much reliance on black box libraries to do trivial things.
On the other, this complaint is decades old. Back in the late 80s there was a software developer for the apple iigs called FTA, which stood for Free Tools Association. They claimed that the tools in the os were too slow and you should code to the raw hardware.
I'm a gray developer and nothing makes me more get-off-my-lawn than too many levels of abstractions. :)
Interesting observation on the current trajectory of the software development environment
What do you think about the increased usage of AI to help developers code? I feel like AI is another step into the abstraction swamp
This AI stuff is annoying me. I don't work in development - I'm a pentester and recently had to work on some scripts with a colleague.
He is a few years my senior and basically completely relies on ChatGPT for simple string matching and splitting in bash. I could not believe my eyes. He got ChatGPT to spit out a command that didn't work exactly as we needed it to because it was looking for the wrong string. It was a really simple fix but he again had to ask ChatGPT for how to fix it, until I was like "let me do it".
It's not that he's dumb or anything, but I feel like he just grew completely lazy from that and doesn't even want to think anymore. Later on he was troubleshooting the same script for a few hours until he noticed that ChatGPT output messed up the order of lines and tried to access a variable that was only declared in the next line.
I think ChatGPT and whatever else are really useful tools, but people tend to use them as shortcuts to learning instead of getting things done quicker. That is in everyone's own responsibility - I just have the hunch that my job will get way more interesting with a new generation of incompetent developers 😁
This article really hit the spot. On the other hand, nowadays development is accessible to everyone and it's really easy to learn development because of the ever growing amount of tools and frameworks. As a result, anybody can become a developer, maybe with superficial knowledge, but if you can make something work, you might be good enough for a company to hire you. However, as a software engineer, I am disappointed of this trend
