Just do the trick in reverse, surely?

  yes no > /dev/null

No you have to get the yesses back out

  cat /dev/null | yes

You might have to load in maybe.so for that to work though.

Strap a thermopile and a peltier on that bad boy

Unironically, yes.

My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.

interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?

I have the 14 inch and i've never felt it go warm.

I think the real question is what IDE we're talking about.

I am mostly in PHPStorm with several projects open + sometimes I have Xcode and/or Android Studio open as well

Haven't used PHPStorm but I know Android Studio does a lot of stuff in the background so I wouldn't be surprised if other JetBrains IDEs do the same. Although PHP isn't compiled...

There's still indexing, linting and code analysis tools running as well as multiple Docker containers (those are pretty much idle outside of running tests or migrations to be fair) and whatever else it could be doing in the background.

I spend 95% of the time with just PHPStorm and other stuff like the terminal, slack and ticketing open. And the browser of course (safari). Xcode and Android Studio are rarely opened. Mostly when I want to test out something in the apps that isn't on testflight / firebase yet.

14 inch, running primarily IntelliJ IDEA and Firefox. Around 10% CPU use most of the time, with of course the occasional spike for compilation.

It's not hot, but with 22C ambient it is enough of a rise to be annoying.