So they won't have idle hands sitting around and itching to redesign something that works just fine.
Alternatively, if they could reassign that 50% of their headcount to bring Mountain Lion or Mavericks to the working state (updating cryptographic stacks, patching vulnerabilities) and just don't... touch... the... UI?
(Author here) I found that over time I spend more time striping someone's badly designed abstractions to get to the real functionality. LLMs are surprisingly good at figuring it out, plowing through the code and documentation and finding out that a 100MB library is in reality a HTTP client for 7 REST endpoints, or something like this.
(Author here) I meant "design" as in designing physical objects — and all our "programming" is "design" in this definition, because "manufacturing" is done by compilers and bundlers.
And I wouldn't write this article 3 months ago. Since then the quality of the output jumped significantly, it is now possible to put the agent into a proper harness (plan/edit/review/test) and the output is good — and if it's not, you discard it and try again, or point out a detail for the next cycle of improvements.
Yes, this requires a lot of forethought to set up, but it works.
I'm not talking only about "web things", I'm working on a project that involves engineering calculations and a lot of optimization of hot paths, both CPU and GPU.
My faviourite configuration pattern for SaaS code: all the configuration for all targets, from local development setup, to unit tests, to CI throwaway deployments, to production is in a single Go package. The current environment is selected by a single environment variable.
Need something else configured beyond your code? Write Go code to emit configs for the current environment, in "gen-config some-tool && some-tool" stanza.
Open source is a technical detail. One can see a less drastical change that will have the same effect.
1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are:
- Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner.
- Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner.
- Spying on a user is an unlawful search.
2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job.
3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years.
4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.
This merge is not going to improve anything by itself, in the same vein as update to HTTP protocol is not going to improve any existing HTTP servers and clients.
A personal anecdote: I have recently discovered I was bored on a job because the tech lead, after working with a dozens of engineers who considered cleanup and simplification tasks boring and wanted to implement new features, stopped parcelling out those and kept them to himself, while distributing new functionality tasks (which I don't personally enjoy doing 40 hours a week) throughout the team.