frje1400

You're welcome. I now feel inspired to try to change your mind, if you don't mind.

I would argue that "concepts" actually are more important than ever. Let's take my structured concurrency example. It doesn't matter here exactly what is, but if it ends up being as important as I think it will be, I likely want to write most concurrent code that way going forward.

However, it will likely be years until agents go to it unless deliberately steered in that direction. And if I want to make agents write it, I need to review it, and if I'm going to review, I need to understand it.

I think this is why I'm not pessimistic about the profession, it still feels like what I'm doing and learning matters.

Yes, as an example structured concurrency in Java (final release in Java 28 perhaps). I think that could totally change how we write concurrent code in that language.

I just upgraded a less important service to Java 27, a few days after its release (several nice features). It's cool how easy it is to upgrade nowadays.

That an agent writes most of the code doesn't mean anything to me here.

My examples are Java because that is the main language where I work.

Same. Claude consistently ignores my instructions related to comments, and continues to be extremely verbose, often irrelevant, or too specific in terms of the current task. When called out on it, it says sorry.

I've resorted to having a final pass where comments are evaluated separately. This is much more successful than trying to get it to write good comments while writing the code.

Data infrastructure in the real world, for non-trivial systems, moves slowly. Migrations are costly and risky. If you need to optimize query performance, you are likely working on one of those non-trivial systems. We have some MongoDB clusters at work (one in my team). Would we have picked it today? Maybe not, because the mindshare isn't there. Does it work fine right now though? Yes, definitely, we have no issues really (the suck in that system is elsewhere).

There's a reason why Orbstack can charge money: it just works, and podman doesn't (on macos).

It is likely still the best environment to read and debug Java code, which you still need in addition to whatever agentic tooling you have. Advanced editing features have clearly lost value though. Is it still worth the money? I don't pay for it myself so I don't know, but probably for Java at least. But obviously it doesn't make sense to pay for it if you just use it as an occasional text editor.

Taking wider responsibility, doing both dev and ops. Learning more about k8s since my company uses it. Trying to think more about testing and verification in general because I think that's what the bottleneck will be.

Obviously lots and lots of companies. Do you think a mature company just migrates to a different database unless it is absolutely necessary? That's a multi year project. I'm at a smaller company (around a 100 devs) and we have easily a dozen different production instances, some small and some larger with many replicas, etc.

New projects get MySQL too because we know it and it works.

So in this solution, you run the backend on a single node that reads/writes from an SQLite file, and that is the entire system?

> If your writes are fast, doing them serially does not cause anyone to wait.

Why impose such a limitation on your system when you don't have to by using some other database actually designed for multi user systems (Postgres, MySQL, etc)?

> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?

Because in 5-10 years you'll have a Java project that people can still maintain as if it's any other Java project. If you pick Kotlin, that might at that point no longer be a popular language in whatever niche you are in. What used to be the cool Kotlin project is now seen as a burden. See: Groovy, Clojure, Scala. Of course, I recognize that not all projects work on these kinds of timelines, but many do, including most things that I work on.

I think that you are describing an ideal scenario that does not reflect what I see in reality. In the "enterprise applications" that I work on, long functions evolve poorly. Meaning, even if a long function follows the ideal of "single thread, step by step" when it's first written, when devs add new code, they will typically add their next 5 lintes to the same function because it's already there. Then after 5 years you have a monster.

> You mention "var", why would we ever want in Java to hold a variable that you can't read immediately what is the type?

var items = new HashMap();

Instead of

HashMap items = new HashMap();

That's the point of var. It reduces noise a lot in some situations.

Orbstack is worth every penny. It's simply amazingly solid compared to Podman on macOS (a year ago at least, I don't know if Podman has improved). We migrated 100+ devs to Orbstack and it was like a collective sigh of relief that we finally had something that actually worked.

great, well-grounded, discussion. highly recommended.