Its super frustrating there is no official guide. I hear lots of suggestions all the time and who knows if they help or not. The best one recently is tell the LLM to "act like a senior dev", surely that is expected by default? Crazy times.
When the world is complicated, entangled, and rapidly changing, would you expect there to be one centralized official guide?*
At the risk of sounding glib or paternalistic -- but I'm going to say it anyway, because once you "see it" it won't feel like a foreign idea being imposed on you -- there are ways that help to lower and even drop expectations.
How? To mention just one: good reading. Read "Be a new homunculus" [1]. To summarize, visualize yourself like you are the "thing that lives in your brain". Yes, this is non-sense but try it anyway.
If you find various ways to accept "the world is changing faster than ever before" and it feels like too much. Maybe you are pissed off or anxious about AI. Maybe AI is being "heavily encouraged" for you (on you?) at work. Maybe you feel like we're living in an unsustainable state of affairs -- don't deny it. Dig into that feeling, talk about it. See where it leads you. Burying these things isn't a viable long-term strategy.**
* There is an "awesome-*" GitHub repository for collecting recommended resources to help with Claude Code: [2] But still requires a lot of curation and end-user experimentation: [2] There are few easy answers in a dynamic uncertain world.
** Yes I'm intentionally cracking the door open to "Job loss is scary. It is time to get real on this, including political activism."
I get that. I probably could have been much more succinct by saying this: We can consciously act in ways that reduce the frustration level even if the environment itself doesn't change. It usually takes time and patience, but not always. Sometimes a particular mindset shift is sufficient to make a frustration completely vanish almost immediately.
Some examples from my experience: (1) Many particular frustrations with LLMs vanish the more I learn about their internals. (2) Frustration with the cacophony of various RAG/graph-database tooling vanishes once I realize that there is an entire slice of VC money chasing these problems precisely because it is uncertain: the victors are not pre-ordained and ... [insert bad joke about vectors here]
Speaking of better in the old days, MSVC in the 90s had edit and continue, where you could stop in a debugger, change the source code and move the current breakpoint back and run it again. Even VBA had this 30 years ago, why cant I do in Python?
The visual IDEs of the 90s (MSVC, Borland Delphi, heck even MS Visual Basic) were way more tightly integrated, performant and usable than anything we have today, despite running on hardware with a fraction of the power. It seems so bizarre how much we've regressed.
Microsoft QuickBasic does too, which I sometimes still use when programming on DOS (one of the reasons for this being what efaref mentioned about performance and usability and being regressed); and also has a "immediate mode" that you can enter BASIC commands and execute them; I think this is helpful.
The best I can do is rebuild the class, then when the function runs next time you get the new code. Is that what you mean? Quarkus is good like this too.
> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
I'm on Spark Scala 2 project and I hate it. Basically any good Scala dev would never want to work on our ETL projects, so we get second rate Python or Java devs like me who bastardize the language to get anything to work. Most of our new stuff is all pyspark, hopefully we can replace Scala asap.
We have these weekly rah rah AI meetings where we swap tips on what we've achieved with copilot and devin. Mostly crickets but everyone is talking with lots of enthusiasm. Its starting to get silly though now, most people can't even get the tools to do anything useful more than trivial things we used to see on stack overflow.
There has always been a lot of Microsoft hate, but now its a whole new level. Windows now really sucks, My new laptop is all Linux for the first time ever. I dont see why this company is still so valuable. Most people only use a browser now and some ios apps, there is no need for Windows or Microsoft (and of course Azure is never anyone's first choice). Steam makes the gamers happy to leave too.
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