- Building robust, maintainable software products across a variety of sectors since 2000
- Last decade building SaaS products with Distributed Cloud/Hybrid Architecture
- Improving software quality practices and processes, advocating clean coding, testing, agile, leadership
@thomasgauvin I found github copilot cli to be quite good for what I was using it for, much better than cursors agent.
The subsidies just made it much better, significantly better value than Claude (when limits dropped)...
You mean 3+ juniors. That's what you really mean.
Actually 10+ juniors. But seniors tend to also be good at architecting, and no, i'm not talking about people with just the "senior" title with a few years exp (you know like 4 or 5, instead of 7-10 is more reasonable). And tend to be great at steering AI's.
2 parts here.
1. No documentation - which is incorrect, we used lots of books, references, technical guides, and magazines etc. there was also Usenet and BBSs... There was no "online" docs like today though, well there was no web either.
2. Libraries - yeah we didn't use pre-packaged third party libraries (no readily available packaging for programming languages). though there was shared code includes on floppies and later cd roms, monthly magazines usually had them.
Well yes for very simple things that's true. The issue is always around maintenance and growth.
For instance I built doc conversion tooling in about a week around 2015, not hard... simple and easy to maintain. If using AI I prob could have shortened to a day or 2 and less intense manual work.
However larger more complex projects, say for instance on-time (pm tool we were using than). Even if building it quick, would require dedicated time for maintenance regardless of AI tooling... Time that could be spent on core product.
My current tools are grok build, Claude code (though less now), GitHub copilot cli, cursor (though not so much).. been quite invested over the past 4 years. Definitely accelerated Dev, but be have to be careful how they are steered.