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So, it was gambling, then.

10×s developers who could produce 0 code without it

Let me see; ten times nothin’, add nothin’, carry the nothin’…

The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use

Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.

Magit is what allowed me to finally commit to switching to Git full time.

It’s such an excellent front-end for Git that I’ve known numerous workmates learn Emacs just to use Magit.

Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

do companies need code that runs quickly on the systems that they are installed on to perform their function.

(Thank you, this indirectly answers one question: the specific optimisation you’re asking about, it seems, is optimised speed of execution when deployed in production. By stating that as the ideal to be optimised, necessarily other properties are secondary and can be worse than optimal.)

Some do pursue that ideal, yes. For example: many businesses seek to deploy their internal applications on hosted environments where they pay not for a machine instance, but for seconds of execution time. By doing this they pay only when the application happens to be running (on a third-party’s managed environment, who will charge them for the service). If they can optimise the run-time of their application for any particular task, they are paying less in hosting costs under such an agreement.

can an unqualified programmer use AI code to build an internal corporate system rather than have to pay for a more qualified programmer’s time either as an internal hire or producing.

This is a question now about paying for the time spent by people to develop and maintain the application, I think? Which is thoroughly different from the time the application spends running a task. Again, I don’t see clearly how “optimise the application for execution speed” is related to this question.

Magit, which is the best Git porcelain around. Git, because it has an unparalleled free-software ecosystem of developer tools that work with it.

Why is Git’s free-software ecosystem so much better than all the other VCSen?

Largely because of marketing (the maker of Linux made this! hey look, GitHub!), but also because it has a solid internal data model that quickly proved to experts that it is fast and flexible and reliable.

Git’s command-line interface is atrocious compared to contemporary DVCSen. This was seen originally as no problem because Git developers intentionally released it as the “plumbing” for a VCS, intending that other motivated projects would create various VCS “porcelain” for various user audiences. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain The interface with sensible operations and coherent interface language, resides in that “porcelain”, which the Git developers explicitly said they were not focussed on creating.

But, of course, the “plumbing” command line interface itself immediately became the primary way people were told to use Git, and the “porcelain” applications had much slower development and nowhere near the universal recognition of Git. So either people didn’t learn Git (learning only a couple of operations in a web app, for example), or to learn Git they were required to use the dreadful user-hostile default “plumbing” commands. It became cemented as the primary way to learn Git for many years.

I was a holdout with Bazaar VCS for quite a while, because its command-line interface dealt in coherent user-facing language and consistent commands and options. It was deliberately designed to first have a good command-line UI, and make a solid DVCS under that. Which it did, quite well; but it was no match for the market forces behind Git.

Well, eventually I found that Magit is the best porcelain for Git, and now I have my favourite VCS.

Maybe closed source organizations are more willing to accept slop code that is bad but can barely work versus open source which won’t?

Because most software is internal to the organisation (therefore closed by definition) and never gets compared or used outside that organisation: Yes, I think that when that software barely works, it is taken as good enough and there’s no incentive to put more effort to improve it.

My past year (and more) of programming business-internal applications have been characterised by upper management imperatives to “use Generative AI, and we expect that to make you nerd faster” without any effort spent to figure out whether there is any net improvement in the result.

Certainly there’s no effort spent to determine whether it’s a net drain on our time and on the quality of the result. Which everyone on our teams can see is the case. But we are pressured to continue using it anyway.

Does business internal software need to be optimized?

Need to be optimised for what? (To optimise is always making trade-offs, reducing some property of the software in pursuit of some optimised ideal; what ideal are you referring to?)

And I’m not clear on how that question is related to the use of LLMs to generate code. Is there a connection you’re drawing between those?

The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.

A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.

Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.