ScottW/rites

I am working on a significant update/rewrite of part of KickoffLabs. I had a task to work through what we do in a Sidekiq worker. It was late on Friday when I got to this part of the code, and I decided to punt on it until Monday.

Monday morning, I grab a cup of coffee and sit down to finish this section off and see a comment I missed (and had missed for a long time).

Outside the screenshot, there is an if statement, ensuring this code was not executed in the last four years. Still, it was frustrating that we had missed removing it for so long.

I figured ChatGPT would have a good solution to stay on top of this, but it mostly just tried to explain to me how to use comments. :)

Next up, I asked on Twitter (and Ruby.Social):

Any suggestions (other than search) to ensure code like this gets cleaned up?

From there, I got a lot of good suggestions.

Two Ruby gems looked interesting:

• todo_or_die
• smart_todo

If I had to choose, I would go with todo_or_die since it would cause a failure/notification locally. I would rather not wait until there was a pull request/etc.

The rest of the suggestions included if statements and date checks. My favorite, and the one I will likely adopt going forward, is to wrap it in a test that fails after a specific date.

I am tired of guessing the future of AI. What I am sure of, something routine like this used to take significantly longer than it does today.

In the past:

1. Google a bit; maybe find someone asking a similar question somewhere (hopefully, do not get distracted by something else).
2. Goto the docs (which often took Google to find)
3. Try and find something related to what you were doing.
4. (Sometimes) Apply what you learn in step #3 to your problem.

Now, we are back to a quick search, which is kind of like Google in the old days.

This piece by Justin Searls has been making the rounds for a week or so.

The Fall of the 10X Developer

My quick take: AI is leveling the developer playing field a bit. You still need to ask it proper questions to get good results. We have known for quite a while that colleges do not prepare you to be a good developer in the real world. AI won’t solve the preparation problem, but it will likely make new hires much more effective sooner.

Still, like any other career, if you just mail it in, you will not truly grow.

We must remember that today’s AI is much more pattern recognition than thinking. Maybe that will change, but for now, I still believe it is more assistive for most use cases than a replacement.

Do you see RuboCop offenses after installing and configuring the Standard VS Code Extension?

To fix this issue, you need to disable RubyLSP’s diagnostics:

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rubyLsp.enabledFeatures": {
    "diagnostics": false
}

Hat Tip

This is likely the best post gem install message I have seen (well, next to HTTParty). Well done Stanard team.

GPT-Migrate

If you’ve ever faced the pain of migrating a codebase to a new framework or language, this project is for you.

We have a bunch of CoffeeScript that I would love to migrate. It is hard to justify the time because it works, but with the improvements made to modern JavaScript, I cannot imagine purposely writing more CoffeeScript at this point.