The local first approach to dev tools and ecosystems does seem to be on the way out.
The pressures for this aren’t even explicitly corporate interest anymore, a lot of it is driven by non-software-experts who are kind of forced to participate in software dev (e.g. your friendly data science colleague who used to be, say, in material science or astrophysics), which is completely understandable. But more concerneing is the trend of actual software engineers who dislike consoles, terminal programs, and basically don’t believe much in understanding their tools.
You see this all the time with basic stuff from git UIs to kubernetes in IDEs. Productivity isn’t really the issue, although it’s always mentioned as an excuse, there’s just a big appeal to reducing any/every cognitive load no matter what the practical cost is for losing understanding/fluency. To give people the benefit of the doubt though, maybe this pressure is ultimately still corporate though and it started with the call for “full stack” devs, continued with devops/platform engineering etc, where specialists are often actively discouraged. Laziness and a higher tolerance for ignoring details may be a necessary virtue if the market forces everyone to be a generalist.
The pressures for this aren’t even explicitly corporate interest anymore, a lot of it is driven by non-software-experts who are kind of forced to participate in software dev (e.g. your friendly data science colleague who used to be, say, in material science or astrophysics), which is completely understandable. But more concerneing is the trend of actual software engineers who dislike consoles, terminal programs, and basically don’t believe much in understanding their tools.
You see this all the time with basic stuff from git UIs to kubernetes in IDEs. Productivity isn’t really the issue, although it’s always mentioned as an excuse, there’s just a big appeal to reducing any/every cognitive load no matter what the practical cost is for losing understanding/fluency. To give people the benefit of the doubt though, maybe this pressure is ultimately still corporate though and it started with the call for “full stack” devs, continued with devops/platform engineering etc, where specialists are often actively discouraged. Laziness and a higher tolerance for ignoring details may be a necessary virtue if the market forces everyone to be a generalist.