yeah, that’s what works for me also. LLMs are a nightmare for debugging but a breeze for this.
another good use case: have it read a ton of code and summarize it. if you’re dealing with a new (to you) area in a legacy application, and trying to fix a problem in how it interacts with a complex open-source library, have the LLM read them both and summarize how they work. (while fact-checking it along the way.)
The problem with Lisp (or at least Clojure) is that abstracting away the boilerplate requires you to correctly identify the boilerplate.
It’s nontrivial to structure your entire AST so that the parts you abstract away are the parts you’re not going to need direct access to three months later. And I never really figured out, or saw anyone else figure out, how to do that in a way which establishes a clear pattern for the rest of your team to follow.
Especially when it comes to that last part, I’ve found pragmatic OOP with functional elements, like Ruby, or task-specific FP, like Elm, to be more useful than Clojure at work or various Lisps for hobby projects. Because patterns for identifying boilerplate are built in. Personal opinion, of course.
I think you're kind of mythologizing both FAANGs and Leetcode here. Leetcode won't get you further than doing amazing work and making your co-workers and colleagues happy. The OP is about how to get serious upgrades in the work you do. Leetcode is a thing that gets you in the door.
Likewise, FAANGs are not in every case "beautiful environments with amazing people dedicated to the craft of engineering." The most toxic person I ever met in my life spent years at Google, and he was not an impressive engineer by any stretch of the imagination. Amazon, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Netflix are all notorious for having Squid Game cultures where everybody knows somebody will get fired soon and they're working hard to make sure it's not them.
Also, this is just false:
Pure programmers are just low value cogs in an assembly line, and being a great programmer only makes you a slightly better low value cog because it won’t be recognized.
I'm not saying it isn't true at any company. But as a statement about the overall industry, it's false. Great architectural decisions can add substantial amounts to a company's bottom line.
Likewise, this feels very naive to me personally:
What is the track for promotion at most companies - being a better programmer or learning project management and becoming a manager/lead who only spends 10% of their day coding?
Principal engineer can be an astonishingly lucrative role.
95% of the dogs in your home are okay with it.
this study from Psychology Today finds that 83% of dogs freak out when they hear loud noises:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202202...