I wrote a thing about this (https://www.klio.org/theory-of-llm-dev-skepticism/) back at the beginning of the year, in a totally different era of AI dev tooling. What you're describing is what I called there "bottom-up" programming.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of first-person advice for you; as I say in that essay, I was also a bottom-up programmer for a long time and was deeply skeptical of top-down approaches. What changed my opinion and my practice was just doing things for long enough that I started having a sense of where things were going to go before I did the exploratory work to find it out, and eventually the exploratory work was unnecessary and I could create a basically-correct top-down design early on. I don't know how you build that experience without actually getting in the reps (which has some implications for future generations of developers, if we have any).
That said, my second-person advice would be to use the agents for the design part of things, too. "Here's the problem, how would you design it?" and then have a conversation with them, push back on the things that seem wrong, imagine reviewing this as a finished design from a coworker and seeing where it looks right and where it doesn't. Ask why it designed things a certain way; suggest alternatives for it to evaluate and think about what it's weighing. Basically borrow the robot's experience to augment and build up yours.
They show a barely visible line down the middle after three years of intense usage. If I were planning to use my OLED monitor that way (I am), seeing those results wouldn't dissuade me at all (they haven't).
Yeah, I'm using one (the Alienware 3926), and it's fine. You'd never know it wasn't IPS except that it's better off-axis and has vastly better blacks and no light bleed.
It always did, we just had the norm that in a liberal democracy, we put that to the side for our dealings with people. Same thing as religion -- a huge deal that shapes people's values and attitudes about the most core aspects of life -- and there was a norm of "no politics or religion" in polite conversation.
I believe that this is your opinion, but my own opinion (having also tried them, and used multiple generations of B&W ones before this) is that the screens look just fine, and that the slight downgrade of contrast isn't a big deal at all.
Yes, I replaced a B&W Sage with the Libra Colour, and used them for a bit side-by-side. Contrast (not sharpness) of B&W text is slightly worse with the color one, but not by so much that you'd notice it if you weren't comparing them next to each other. The resolution of actual color is worse, but obviously you can't get color at all on the B&W one, so hard to argue that this is a downgrade.
Unless you're a real contrast freak, I think most people would be slightly happier with the color than the B&W; but it's definitely not worth paying extra for.
It's true that developing junior devs is challenging (but it always was), but that's not what this is about: This is about the kind of not-that-good, mid-ass programmers who make up the silent bulk of the industry. The ones who have 20 years of experience, but who you still wouldn't trust to write fizzbuzz.
Those people are doomed. Which is fine in a lot of ways, but will be devastating for their economic prospects.
Talented people should still be worried, the problem is not the developers, it's the type of work the industry can support. There aren't that many jobs that require above average software capabilities, and you're competing with all those people who just got shafted out of their mid tier positions but actually had talent. Hopefully there will still be enough roles for all these excellent engineers.
In the same way there is only so much artisan hand crafted furniture to sell, you're a lucky craftsman if you can make a living doing that these days.
I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.)
Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of first-person advice for you; as I say in that essay, I was also a bottom-up programmer for a long time and was deeply skeptical of top-down approaches. What changed my opinion and my practice was just doing things for long enough that I started having a sense of where things were going to go before I did the exploratory work to find it out, and eventually the exploratory work was unnecessary and I could create a basically-correct top-down design early on. I don't know how you build that experience without actually getting in the reps (which has some implications for future generations of developers, if we have any).
That said, my second-person advice would be to use the agents for the design part of things, too. "Here's the problem, how would you design it?" and then have a conversation with them, push back on the things that seem wrong, imagine reviewing this as a finished design from a coworker and seeing where it looks right and where it doesn't. Ask why it designed things a certain way; suggest alternatives for it to evaluate and think about what it's weighing. Basically borrow the robot's experience to augment and build up yours.
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