A shockingly common approach lol. Like if you just buy every brand of turd polish you can find and apply them all, eventually you’ll have something other than a turd. Except all the turd polishes are just the same turd blend in different solvents, so you keep coating your original turd in new layers of turd solution and are then shocked when you wind up with a different, larger turd.

I use the term in mild jest, relative to the new fashion of having LLMs blast out huge broken tracts of code for me to detangle. I guess “old-fashioned” can mean outdated but that’s not what I mean here, just “the manner in which I wrote code before I had access to LLMs”

Any methodology becomes old-fashioned if it sticks around long enough to see the next new fashion. Though the new fashion has also made me seriously consider the goat herder route. Turns out it’s a tough industry to move into.

I’ve had good luck with the docs so far, but I only just just got started with them so maybe I just haven’t encountered any issues yet. Overall though, for the level of quality they’ve managed to put on a FOSS tool I’m happy to grant them a few rough patches in the doc.

I think we’ll course correct at some point but I do feel bad for devs entering the field right now. They’re getting pressured by the industry to become familiar with these tools because knowing the hot new thing is supposed to be how you get a job, but you skip the “let’s figure out how to build something cool with the legos we have” part and move straight into the (IMO much more tedious) “this ball of spaghetti has a broken strand somewhere, lets poke around until we find it” part. And I think, now that I’ve missed it, I can appreciate how much struggling with the build step helps, with maintenance and future new builds.