If committing over the weekend is what makes the difference between committing a secret and not, that’s an issue.

Saying the chance of something going sideways is smaller than on Windows isn’t saying much. I’ll pick a distro that’s stable by default, TYVM.

How so?

Of course but presumably on occasion you do work in other languages? I work in all kinds of languages and so jumping between them it’s pretty handy to bridge the gap.

If I were jumping languages a lot, I definitely think it would be helpful. But pretty much 100% of what I've done for the last 3-4 years is Go (mostly) or JavaScript (occasionally). I have used chatgpt the few times I needed to work in some other language, but that has been pretty rare.

I think you could definitely still get value out of generating simple stuff though, at least for me it really helps get projects done quickly without burning myself out

If simple stuff == for loops and basic boilerplate, the kind of stuff that copilot can autocomplete, I write that on autopilot and it doesn't really register. So it doesn't contribute to my burnout. If simple stuff == boring, boilerplate tests, I'll admit that I don't do nearly enough of that. But doing the 'prompt engineering' to get copilot to write that wasn't any less painful that writing it myself.

For small one off scripts it makes them actually save more time than they take to write

The other day I wrote a duplicate image detector for my sister (files recovered from a dying drive). In hindsight I could have asked chatgpt to do it. But it was something I've never done before and an interesting problem so it was more fun to do it myself. And most of the one off stuff I'm asked to do by coworkers is tied to our code and our system and not the kind of thing chatgpt would know how to do.

func randomRGB(uid int) color.RGBA {
	b := binary.BigEndian.AppendUint64(nil, uint64(uid))
	h := sha256.Sum256(b)
	return color.RGBA{h[0], h[1], h[2], 255}
}

That took me under three minutes and half of that was remembering that RGBA is in the color package, not the image package, and uint-to-bits is in the binary package, not the math package. I have found chatgpt useful when I was working in a different language. But trying to get chatgpt or copilot to write tests or documentation for me (the kind of work that bores me to death), doing the prompt engineering to get it to spit out something useful was more work than just writing the tests/documentation myself. Except for the time when I needed to write about 100 tests that were all nearly the same. In that case, using chatgpt was worth it.

I have to strongly disagree with you. I've used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren't for that, it's still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I'm forced to.

The only part of copilot that was actually useful to me in the month I spent with the trial was the autocomplete feature. Chatting with it was fucking useless. ChatGPT can’t integrate into my IDE to provide autocomplete.

I finally was able to push back against all the meetings and shit I was having to deal with by making it extremely clear that the schedule was going to slip badly otherwise

My entire point is that you aren’t forced into using that cloud crap for normal development. And you aren’t forced into any specific IDE. You can choose whatever IDE you want unless your employer mandates something specific.

That first paragraph is basically my job now, except for the investors and clients part. We have an actual CTO so he gets to deal with all that crap and I can focus on the tech stuff.

I use various strategies depending on what seems appropriate, including the two you mention. I've never felt the lack of DI.

No one I know in my generation inherited anything like that. Personally, the peripherals my dad had would be hopelessly out of date now. I am a mechanical keyboard nerd, so maybe if he had a nice one of those... but if he did it probably got thrown out or donated years ago. Of the computer hardware I own, I can't think of much of it that would be valuable 10-20 years from now. I have mechanical keyboards, but they're nothing special. Of course that's just me.

I think there are two big differences: can the tool be maintained/restored when it's 10-20 years old, and how fast do those kinds of tools evolve? None of my computers will be relevant as anything besides curiosities, nor will my plethora of microcontrollers, because the tools that will be available 10 years from now will be so much more powerful. If my soldering iron was nice enough to care about, that could be valuable 10-20 years from now because it's dead simple; though maybe not, maybe the art of soldering will get to the point where irons are useless. I also do woodworking as a hobby - if I have kids and they're into it, my planes and other high-quality hand tools could become heirlooms. On the other hand, none of my power tools are the level of quality that I expect to still be working in 20 years.

I can believe that some people are making websites/blogs/software/etc that their kids might take up. Linux has been around for over 30 years now. But that seems like a small minority - the software world is fickle and the number of projects that last that long is small.