hnrodey
You guys are smoking crack if you think regular people are going Linux.
This company cannot be helped. They cannot be saved through knowledge.
See ya.
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
https://www.fullyearcal.com/calendar/iMRr-2l16tI/software-en...
- Copilot using Visual Studio and VS Code
- ChatGPT Plus / Claude, copy/pasting back and forth
- Cursor, free trial and w/ Claude api key
Copilot was like 30/70 good-to-bad. The autocomplete hijacks my mind whereby creating a mental block at my ability to write the next token of code. The suggestions were occasionally amazing, but multiple times it introduced a subtle bug that I missed and later spent hours debugging. Not really a time saver. I quit Copilot just as they were introducing the embedded chat feature so maybe it's got better.
In Visual Studio, I thought Copilot was garbage. The results (compared to using in VS Code) were just awful. The VS extension felt unrefined and lacking.
ChatGPT / Claude - this is a decent way to get AI programming. Multiple times it fixed bugs for me that just simply blew me away with it's ability to understand the code and fix it. Love it's ability to scaffold large chunks of working code so I can then get busy enhancing it for the real stuff. Often, it will suggest code using older version of a framework or API so it's necessary to prompt it with stuff like "For Next.js, use code from v14 and the app router". There is thought required that goes into the prompt to increase chances of getting it right the first time.
Cursor - ah, Cursor. Thus far, my favorite. I went through my free trial and opted into the free plan. The embedded sidebar is nice for AI chat - all of the benefits of using ChatGPT/Claude but keeping me directly in the "IDE". The cost is relatively cheap when hooked to my Claude api key. I like the ability to ask questions about specific lines of code (embedded in the current window), or add multiple files to the chat window to give it more context.
Cursor does a great job at keeping you in the code the entire time so there's less jumping from Cursor to browser and back.
Winner: Cursor
As a C#/Java backend developer, you might not like leaving IntelliJ or Visual Studio to use Cursor or VS Code. Very understandable. In that case, I'd probably stick to using ChatGPT Plus or paid Claude. I suggest the premium versions so for premium uptime access to the services and higher limits for their flagship models.
The free versions might get you by, but expect to be kicked out of them from time to time based on system demand.
As for an installation script - I agree that is a big effort. ROI depends on frequency of the onboarding process. 10+ people per week? It might make sense. 3-4 people per year, not so much.
Smooth onboarding is a feature, not a baseline. Great onboarding takes consistent time, effort and energy to create and maintain.
Ensure that you have a predictable time to complete the onboarding. 1 day, 3 days, 2 weeks, etc. Time to complete onboarding should be very predictable and consistent.
Use relevant measures to reduce onboarding duration. Example: our developers need to install Oracle database on their Windows machine - normally it takes several hours to complete this step. We found that the Docker setup for Oracle can be completed in less than one hour.
Something I learned recently, which might help your scrapers, is the ability in Playwright to sniff the network calls made through the browser (basically, programmatic API to the Network tab of the browser).
The boost is that you allow the website/webapp to make the API calls and then the scraper focuses on the data (rather than allowing the page to render DOM updates).
This approach falls apart if the page is doing server side rendering as there are no API calls to sniff.
Mental Models I Rely On To Beat Git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm2x7xWQID4&t=7s
note: this is my video