Youtube premium also works on my phone, Chromecast, and importantly, all of my wife's devices, all without needing to fuss with anything. It also supports the creators who put work into my entertainment, and more than watching ads even would have (something I care about, and think other people should as well).
It's not easier for everyone. It's a tradeoff, like anything.
If you are one person with one or two devices that you use YouTube on, and you're willing to make certain sacrifices, then yes I agree.
If you have a family of a few people, all with multiple devices that they might want to use YouTube on, that also use YouTube Music, then I don't personally think it's easier. I'd rather part with $30/mo and have back the time I'd spend dealing with the nonsense resulting from trying to do the ad block or alternative app route
5 people in my family each with multiple devices. To get them all to use FireFox which isn't even actual FireFox on iPhone/iPad, ditch the native apps, install specific extensions, figure out how to get it onto their TVs, how to get YouTube music to work in CarPlay with an ad blocker, probably other things I'm not thinking of... would be much more effort than paying.
Same as people often say about AI writing bespoke applications, these days... Libraries (like applications) often have 98% stuff you don't need, and 2% stuff you do. You can end up better off with your own thing.
I've always liked writing my own libraries and minimal frameworks for PHP, which seems to be a very unpopular opinion, but it almost entirely removes churn from your stack, which is nice for tools that may stick around for years or decades. I also never switched off jquery, preferring simple techs. I'm almost definitely operating at a smaller scale than most web developers here, though.
I've gone back and forth on this. I've been burned with third party libraries, but I've also been burned spending so much time/effort maintaining my own library that I can't get the real job done.
If you can find exercise that's "play" for you, that's the trick.
I like hacky sack and kettlebells. I can play hacky sack for 15 minutes, wherever I am, and easily keep my heart rate between 160 and 190 bpm. I can do kettlebells in my bedroom in 15 minutes, and stay pretty strong and capable. They're both genuinely fun for me, and leave me feeling better (lower stress, more alert, stronger, more agile, more attractive, less like a lazy slob).
I never could spend 10 minutes to and from the gym, and another 45 there, or anything like that. I feel lucky to have found these things I do like.
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.
Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
> Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
Writing only consists of "making sure it does the task", reviewer have to understand code first, check if it does the task, then check whether it doesn't affect something else negatively (and it can be meta things like "doesn't adhere to project style", even if technical side is correct)
> Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
If there's one thing that I learned from AI proponents is that they don't value correctness. They only want to write more code every day. Which actually baffles me, because for a given feature set, there should be a Definition of Done, and the only work left should be slight alterations for oversight and dependency updates.
Reviews take way more time than new features, and often utilize 3 subagents at a time - it's not uncommon to have reviews take 3 hours when the feature only took 15 minutes. The numbers here are just estimates, though - I don't keep track. "10x to 20x tokens on review" is probably underestimating review cost, if anything.
I don't review all code myself, but I do spend down-time reading code. When I find obviously bad code/patterns/whatever, I don't just fix it directly - I work to create automated tests (like static analysis, almost) or adjust or create prompts and tools for agents (either for review stage or initial implementation) to solve that class of issue, instead of just that instance of it.
I never review the first iteration. I review it after the agents have already poured a ton of time into it, if ever.
I do sometimes watch agents work, and redirect them if I see them doing something dumb. But, usually, I have 5+ agents running, not counting sub-agents, and I'm just messing with the apps myself to find the next feature to create or polish.
Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company as a full time employee.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
Have you found that it becomes more natural?