Keep in mind, we don't do a lot of things that big IDES used to do.

Dumb example: graphical user interfaces. Heavyweight IDEs used to have a GUI designer (Netbeans had a very nice one).

GUI development is niche nowadays.

Also we have much better cross-editor tooling, just think of language servers (https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/) and build servers (https://build-server-protocol.github.io/). Back in the day each IDE had their own.

Vim and Emacs can do a lot of what IDEs used to offer thanks to language servers and build servers. Before those (lang/build servers) they were largely useless for large scale development (believe me, i tried).

> A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me.

but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.

True, but this is like saying 10 years ago: you don't need to learn React, you can continue coding in Angular.

People do want to learn and use new tech but instead what is promoted is an access to a proprietary and (increasingly more) expensive API.

React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't.

Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.

> that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software

yeah i'm gonna call BS on that. what you describe was happening well before modern-day AI (LLM, agentic stuff etc) became mainstream: think of google accounts binding your identity to your searches, gmail, google adsense, facebook, instagram and twitter (and others).

And the products and services that do what you describe can do that just as well without ai.

So yeah the problem is absolutely real but AI is not the culprit here.

The author is making a very coarse reasoning mistake.

Using AI is and "think, how to write, how to do a simple reliable search, how to tell fact from fiction" are not mutually exclusive.

Yeah I don't think this line of reasoning is to be taken any seriously at all. It can be... left behind.

For me (tried scala professionally in ~2015) it was:

- Too much fanfare to do trivial things

- sub-par tooling (sbt wasn’t that great)

- libraries that were their own world and had sub-par documentation, often implicitly assuming you already knew how to use the library

I have no hard feelings for scala, it’s just not my thing.

At the time i also kinda lost the interest for functional languages because i tried golang and it was incredibly more practical, productive and fun to write.

i had submitted this about one week ago, yet it yielded no comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840104

Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.

I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.

gitlab.xfce.org is absolutely not a full-time job. It's run by one guy in his spare time, and that spare time doesn't even amount to a part-time job.

I do agree about performance, though.

> managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.

Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?

Hundreds or 10k+ users?

I imagine requirements and integrations may differ a lot. I have seen many incidents with a large instance.

yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that.

if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.

however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).

so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.

> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves

I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.

I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.

I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.

It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.

Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?

Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.

Stop spamming please

Interestingly, this is pretty much what amazon did with amazon linux 2023.

It’s also noteworthy that amazon had promised more frequent release of amazon linux moving forward, but afaik there is no significant release after 2023 (i’d be happy to be proven wrong)

You're right, I keep looking into when will Vercel update their build image infrastructure, which is currently based on 2023.