Huh? Main file? Do you mean main package? A module can contain an arbitrary number of main packages but I don’t see how that has anything to do with this post. Also are you saying modules are equivalent to classes? That may be the strangest take I’ve ever heard about Go.

How so?

Of course but presumably on occasion you do work in other languages? I work in all kinds of languages and so jumping between them it’s pretty handy to bridge the gap.

If I were jumping languages a lot, I definitely think it would be helpful. But pretty much 100% of what I've done for the last 3-4 years is Go (mostly) or JavaScript (occasionally). I have used chatgpt the few times I needed to work in some other language, but that has been pretty rare.

I think you could definitely still get value out of generating simple stuff though, at least for me it really helps get projects done quickly without burning myself out

If simple stuff == for loops and basic boilerplate, the kind of stuff that copilot can autocomplete, I write that on autopilot and it doesn't really register. So it doesn't contribute to my burnout. If simple stuff == boring, boilerplate tests, I'll admit that I don't do nearly enough of that. But doing the 'prompt engineering' to get copilot to write that wasn't any less painful that writing it myself.

For small one off scripts it makes them actually save more time than they take to write

The other day I wrote a duplicate image detector for my sister (files recovered from a dying drive). In hindsight I could have asked chatgpt to do it. But it was something I've never done before and an interesting problem so it was more fun to do it myself. And most of the one off stuff I'm asked to do by coworkers is tied to our code and our system and not the kind of thing chatgpt would know how to do.

func randomRGB(uid int) color.RGBA {
	b := binary.BigEndian.AppendUint64(nil, uint64(uid))
	h := sha256.Sum256(b)
	return color.RGBA{h[0], h[1], h[2], 255}
}

That took me under three minutes and half of that was remembering that RGBA is in the color package, not the image package, and uint-to-bits is in the binary package, not the math package. I have found chatgpt useful when I was working in a different language. But trying to get chatgpt or copilot to write tests or documentation for me (the kind of work that bores me to death), doing the prompt engineering to get it to spit out something useful was more work than just writing the tests/documentation myself. Except for the time when I needed to write about 100 tests that were all nearly the same. In that case, using chatgpt was worth it.

I have to strongly disagree with you. I've used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren't for that, it's still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I'm forced to.

My point is that I strongly feel that the kind of "AI" we have today is much closer to bacteria than to cats on that scale. Not that an LLM belongs on the same scale as biological life, but the point stands in so far as "is this thing intelligent" as far as I'm concerned.

The only part of copilot that was actually useful to me in the month I spent with the trial was the autocomplete feature. Chatting with it was fucking useless. ChatGPT can’t integrate into my IDE to provide autocomplete.

I saw in other comments that you aren't happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they're focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?

The project I am working on joined the GitLab for Open Source program and it was absolutely painless. All we needed to do was submit an application and now we're using Ultimate without paying a cent.

I'm not sure it's what you're referring to, but one of the pain points for me is that open source projects (that don't join the program) no longer have access to lots of free SaaS CI hours. That sucks, but I can't blame them - they had a plague of crypto miners taking advantage of those free CI hours. It's not reasonable to expect them to eat that cost, especially when the open source program is so easy to join.

In my book, "memory safety" also means avoiding data races. AFAIK Rust prevents most or all races by enforcing ownership and lifetime of pointers.

My entire point is that any CS degree from any university is meaningless unless you know that university's CS program is actually good

I mean, yes, but also I’ve dealt with plenty of awful engineer designed interfaces that made my job harder than I’d like

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "dependency injection" means. When I hear "dependency injection" I think of a DI framework such as Unity, so I thought "using DI" meant using one of those frameworks.