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ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!

I've seen seniors and juniors bring novel tools in. Seniors do it less often perhaps - but only because we have seen this before under a different name and realize it isn't novel. (sometimes the time has finally come, sometimes it fail again for the same reason it failed last time)
I've seen seniors bring up novel ideas to juniors—well, novel to the juniors anyway.

Just an example. I've been in so many code bases over the years… I had a newer engineer come aboard who, when he saw some code I recently wrote with labels (!) he kind of blanched. He thought "goto == BAD". (We're talking "C" here.)

But this was code that dealt with Apple's CoreFoundation. More or less every call to CF can fail (which means returning NULL in the CF API). And (relevant) passing NULL to a CF call, like when trying to append a CF object to a CF array, was a hard crash. CF does no param checking. (Why, that would slow it down—you, dear reader, are to do all the sanity checking.)

So you might have code similar to:

CFDictionary dict = NULL;

dict = CFCreateDictionary();

if (!dict)

    goto bail;
You would likely continue to create arrays, etc—insert them into your dictionary, maybe return the dictionary at the end. And again, you checked for NULL at every call to CF, goto bail if needed.

Down past 'bail' you could CFRelease() all the non-null instances that you do not return. This was how we collected our own garbage. :-)

In any event, goto labels made the code cleaner: your NULL-checking if-statements did not have to nest crazy deep.

The new engineer admitted surprise that there might be a place for labels. (Or, you know, CF could have been more NULL-tolerant and simply exited gracefully.)

I work at a place with lots of rules around what can and can’t be used. When someone new start we end up spending a lot of time policing to make sure they aren’t using stuff they should be.

A very basic example were the interns who constantly tried to use Google Docs for everything, their personal accounts no less. I had to stop them and point them back to MS Office at least a dozen times.

In other situations, people will try and use free tools that don’t scale well, because that’s what they used in college or as a hobby. It can take a lot of work to point them to the enterprise solution that is already approved and integrated with everything. A basic example of this would be someone using Ansible from their laptop when we have Ansible Automation Platform, which is better optimized for running jobs around the globe and automatically logs to Splunk to create an audit trail.

I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
I'm clued in to that but at this point who cares. All the models are fungible for the coding assistance use case.
I'd hope people are. It's painfully obvious this entire AI push is rent-seeking half hidden by big tech money. At some point the free money is going to go away, but the rent for every service will remain.
you will be able to run code assistants on your own machine soon, just like how you can run intense graphical simulations (videogames?) thanks to GPUs
idk about that with the rising cost of hardware. But I guess if your IT dept is doing the purchasing thats not really your problem.
Are you talking about Antigravity, Firebase Studio, or something else?

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