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jtms

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You’re missing the point, it’s about those tools drastically improving context window management. When you want to tackle large refactors, Claude Code will blow tens of thousands of tokens just searching for files and various refactor related file manipulation. When you run out of window in the middle of a big refactor you’re going to have a bad time.

Absolutely feel the same way. I have been writing software professionally for over 20 years and truly love the craft. Now that I am using Claude Code basically 100% of the time my productivity has certainly increased, but I agree there is a hollowness to it - where before the process felt like art it now feels like industrialized mass manufacturing. I’m hoping that I can rediscover some of what has kept me so fascinated with software in this new reality, because quite a bit of the joy has indeed been stripped away for me.

"Better Auth’s pitch is simple: Let developers implement everything from simple authentication flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on their databases and embed it all on the back end."

Its absolutely bonkers to me that web development has gotten to a point where this is a novel pitch. Up until not that long ago ALL auth was done directly in your own database and embeded in your own backend. Am I missing something?

Yeah agree. I spent a few hours looking at the langchain repo when it first hit the scene and could not for the life of me understand what value it actually provided. It (at least at the time) was just a series of wrappers and a few poorly thought through data structures. I could find almost no actual business logic.

I was there a few years ago and will echo the fact that the folks I interacted with at the museum of computing were truly world class fantastic. When someone loves what they do and where they are it really shows.

I might be a bit biased (I wrote and maintain a similar gem), but I think this is a great pattern that solves a real problem that is encountered and does so in a very Ruby kinda way. I particularly like the mental model of stringing together multiple service objects into a "pipeline" and the semantics chosen for the API. Kudos to OP for putting this out there!

I'd like to think this is kind of just the cost of discovering that 1 pattern out of many thousands that is actually useful. I am going to guess the Gang of Four didn't just sit down and bang out the entire catalog of design patterns in one extremely productive programming session. They likely battle tested hundreds of different patterns, most of them being thrown out as not useful or a bad abstraction before arriving at the set they published in the book.

It’s not an actual crime, but If it’s an online multiplayer game it is a violation of the terms of service. Add to that it tends to ruin other people’s enjoyment of the service, thus negating the main purpose of the service. I think people who cheat in online games are pretty sad, pathetic, and selfish.

I think its probably fair to say that we as individual developers are always going to push for the thing we are most familiar and comfortable with. Almost nothing is "complicated" or "bloated" if you are really productive with it and know all the pain points to avoid. My experience with Java is that the language is great, but the ecosystem and tooling is where the bloat and complexity comes in. If I were really accustomed to this ecosystem then I probably wouldn't hold this opinion.

I started in PHP land 20+ years ago, moved into Ruby for the next 10, and now am firmly in JS/Node land. I have used Postgres nearly the entire time. It's my experience that you will never go wrong picking Postgres as your primary data store. Love that DB.

I believe the main selling point is portability and flexibility. Anything written in a language that can be compiled to wasm can now be turned into a web service.

I haven't been part of the Ruby community in a few years - Market demand forced me out of full time Ruby/Rails and into React/JS/TS land. Is Pry still a thing? I remember being able to drop into IRB via Pry within a running Rails process was extremely powerful and (IMHO) way better than any debugger I have ever used.