On LSP, Automation, and Friction

The topic of software development tools has been interesting to me for a while - after some mindless usage of the IDEs I’ve gradually came to a conclusion that less might actually be more. I’ve been trying to gradually reduce my dependency on anything extravagant or excessive, including autocomplete. And especially Copilot.

Usually I don’t talk to people about it, because it seems like a deeply personal preference, and they think I’m a weirdo for rejecting these productive tools anyway, so I was surprised to see an interview with the creator of Odin programming language, Ginger Bill, who talked exactly about that.

He was also talking about (not) automating the package management, and while I’m not necessarily sold on it, that reminded me of several similar ideas I’ve heard before.

One of it was on game design - a player was complaining that a certain action could be automated, but the developer insisted that it was a part of the design, and it gave that action a level of gravitas and importance, that would be missed otherwise.

I think gravitas is something that is often lost in modern life in general - you don’t go to a library anymore, you make a few keystrokes and here it is, all the information you need. You don’t go to the VHS rental store through the snowstorm at night only to discover that the movie you wanted to rent was already rented out, you just open Netflix. And similar reduction could be seen in many aspects of life, where you go through some of these actions almost on auto-pilot (except for the job interviews, of course - these are getting longer and harder).

And while I don’t miss some of the olden days, maybe some of the actions indeed need to be slowed down, to have more friction, to be more meticulous, more purposeful, instead of just zooming through everything and forgetting a second later.