I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers. I know that I'm not the first one. My best days are when I'm removing code. I'm very wary from using frameworks and huge libraries. I learned few frameworks and libraries, I've chosen few that correspond to my style and I'm very careful when it comes to adapting new ones. I prefer to spend a week coding auth layer rather than installing some SaaS connector and call it a day. I prefer to spend few days reading source code and developing my own solution (or just discarding the whole idea) rather than quickly google something and move on.
May be I'm just unprofessional, I don't know. I get my stuff done, may be not as fast, but at least I understand every bit of my code and I rarely have unexpected surprises. I understand that there are other approaches, but I just don't enjoy that way, so I follow mine as long as I can find work. And I actually like things that other people find boring, according to this thread. Withing "business code" - hate it, writing "auth layer" - love it.
I'm the same. I tend to get derailed on making my code philosophically "right" and aesthetically "soothing" (for lack of a better word), even when it doesn't obviously matter to the scope of the project, rather than just it to the point where it _works_ by some operation of the Holy Spirit. Unsuprisingly I'm the "is he working ?" guy (I may fit in the attention disorder category that was a point of discussion in the confidence thread[1] the other day). But at least I'm not the "his code broke our shit again" guy.
I don't think you're unprofessional. In fact, your sentiment is a belief that was strongly held by early UNIX programmers. Two quotes I particularly like:
"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." -- Douglas McIllroy
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson
But unfortunately, we've come to a situation where SLOC and innovation for the sake of innovation is more important than code quality.
> I think that there's a division between "productive" developers and "meticulous" developers.
There’s a huge difference between:
1. Writing the core logic for an algorithm from scratch
2. “Connecting things”: e.g. writing the “click” handler for a button press, adding an auth middleware to a HTTP request handler
The latter consists mostly of boilerplate code: code that thousands of developers have already written. Copilot is useless for the former, and great for the latter. It has no idea what algorithm you want to implement, since you may be the first to write it, but it has seen the code of countless other individuals who needed to write the same boilerplate.
May be I'm just unprofessional, I don't know. I get my stuff done, may be not as fast, but at least I understand every bit of my code and I rarely have unexpected surprises. I understand that there are other approaches, but I just don't enjoy that way, so I follow mine as long as I can find work. And I actually like things that other people find boring, according to this thread. Withing "business code" - hate it, writing "auth layer" - love it.