Multitasking and context switching has been increasing for years, instant messaging boosted them again, and agent-based workflows are only going to push further in that direction. The OS needs to support that, and it's not an app-level concern: I use the same apps in each of my tasks.

IDEs can help with this of course: they tend to have workspace/project primitives and can restore code and terminal contexts from those. But there's always a bunch of other connected stuff that can't be linked: web pages (some IDEs are starting to manage those too), agents which don't reside in the IDE, relevant chats with colleagues, project management apps and so on.

This is clearly an OS-level concern, not an app-level concern.

Some of the iPad experiments with alternative window organisation looked kind of promising, but they’re just not powerful or intuitive enough IMO.

The server deciding what to replace reminds me of some old (dangerous, I think) patterns like returning actual JS from the server which the client then executes.

But it was a nice pattern to work with: for example if you made code changes you often got hot-reloading ‘for free’ because the client can just query the server again. And it was by definition infinitely flexible.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone with experience of both Datastar and Hotwire. Hotwire always seemed very similar to HTMX to me, but on reflection it’s arguably closer to Datastar because the target is denoted by the server. I’ve only used Hotwire for anything significant, and I’m considering rewriting the messy React app I’ve inherited using one of these, so it’s always useful to hear from others about how things pan out working at scale.

- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Technological-Revolutions-Financial...

The process of _actually_ benefitting from technological improvements is not a straight line, and often requires some external intervention.

e.g. it’s interesting to note that the rising power of specific groups of workers as a result of industrialisation + unionisation then arguably led to things like the 5-day week and the 8-hour day.

I think if (if!) there’s a positive version of what comes from all this, it’s that the same dynamic might emerge. There’s already lots more WFH of course, and some experiments with 4-day weeks. But a lot of resistance too.

Your experience sounds more sophisticated than mine, but the one time I was able to get even basic debugger support into a production Ruby app, it made fixing certain classes of bug absolutely trivial compared to what it would have been.

The main challenge was getting this considered as a requirement up front rather than after the fact.

Since I'm almost always on my mac, it means they're available in every shell, including remote shells, and in other situations like on Slack or writing documentation.

I mostly use § as a prefix so I don't type them accidentally (although my git shortcuts are all `gg`-consonant which is not likely to appear in real typing).

[1] https://kapeli.com/dash

But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup.

I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone.

OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!

I switched to using an Ergodox after long hours working on a MacBook Pro made my wrists start to hurt and my pinkie finger to go numb (and this was back in the day when a MBP keyboard was still decent!). I can still type full speed on a regular keyboard but it doesn’t feel as comfortable, and I think there’s a genuine health issue at least for some people.

Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:

- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;

- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.

I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.

I guess this could trip up if the compiler optimisations available when considering all the code at once means that the out-of-context code actually does something different in testing...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634983

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