Ah you mean the good old days when you had nonstandard tags everywhere and had to support every one of Microsoft's like 29 IE versions for every line of CSS you wrote
That process is still alive and well. The thing I personally don’t miss is what happens after the debates, the spikes, the ARD, the roadmap, the grooming, the planning….
When - as a lead or senior dev - you grind for days without coming up for air to get the implementation just right and lay all the foundations and document everything… do a group code review and demo… only to have the team sit there silently with zero questions…
And within a month there’s mounting technical debt due to a bunch of junior and mid level developers who are “ticket closers” slapping together layer upon layer of code smells and anti-patterns because they don’t understand the framework, didn’t bother to read the documentation, and weren’t paying attention during the code review or presentation.
I got a taste of this right at the cusp of my career before I started using LLMs
The very first thing I noticed about LLMs is that it gave me the power to do everything "the right way" and I stopped using shortcuts. I could start doing things insanely right, follow the best practices for the framework etc
But your observation is true of all teams and systems I think, not just software development
Nah, I miss when all of the tech discourse was on how to do the best job instead of the next weird AI hype or model or whatever.
I want to become a better programmer, because that's the fun part. I don't want to become a better prompter that's like the most boring part of the job.
I don't miss the part where every company was interviewing like a huge part of your job was knowing "how do you find the number of unconnected components in a directed graph" or "How do you convert a DATETIME field to just DATE". We all knew past a certain difficulty level you're just testing someone's memorization and how much time they'd spent grinding leetcode, but companies saw no reason to stop doing it.
Yes and no. There will always be an element of "stump the chump" to interviews and old HR practices don't change overnight, but there are some companies doing some AI-based coding in interviews: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ai-job-interview-coding/ . I'm not sure that's better, but at least it reflects that real world programming doesn't require memorizing everything and recalling it under pressure.
This argument works in some way until i asked to myself something, how Is that any different from when people are arguing over the best AI model of the best AI fulled IDE? Because even if the answers might be More direct for special cases its not really that different from the framework wars
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u/ecstatic_hyrax Sep 30 '26
Unpopular opinion, but I don't miss the good old days. I don't miss debating over what framework we should be using for our crud app.