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Everyone and their dog has been told in the last decade that learning to code is important. I've grown up hearing that sentiment consistently and I'm sure it contributed a lot to me falling in love with this field.
However, coding (at least in its current form) seems like one of the most at-risk forms of work in terms of AI automation. I love writing code and I think I'm good at it, but I'm not so sure I'll be able to compete long-term with AI. I'm sure there'll be a few "John Henry"s, but many devs will probably change. Keep in mind, I'm thinking on the scale of length of a whole career and not saying this is happening already. However, with LLM context lengths increasing and special hardware made for ML inference (like groq), it feels like we're not far out from repo-level AI coding. At this rate of development, I could imagine a decade of progress might transform many aspects of day-to-day work for software development.
With all that being said, what advice would you give to someone just starting their career who wants to avoid shorter-term local maxima? I've heard lots of mixed reviews on PhDs and advanced degrees compared to working in industry, but should that calculus change with AI? Thank you!
We’ve received some great contributions from a couple super active members (thank you!) and now have automated schema linting & installation testing for new package recipes, UI improvements, an interactive search command TUI to explore available packages, IDE package recipe autocompletion automatically with SchemaStore, lots of new packages, and support for installing package groups like modern-unix.
Webman is not trying to fill the same niche of homebrew; I think homebrew does a great job for Unix systems. However, Webman is built to be able to install on Windows too as a first-class citizen. It installs release binaries rather than building from source, which keeps package recipes lightweight & lets us require no dependencies. Webman also makes it super easy to install and switch between different versions of software (similar to tools like nvm). I’ve been using it to manage different versions of Go, and it’s worked nicely!
If you find any packages you’d like that aren’t in the webman-pkgs repo yet, I’d love to help you out merging a PR! With the new schema support, it’s never been easier to write a package recipe, and CI will make sure your package installs correctly on each supported platform.
If you find the project interesting, give it a star! It means a lot :)
FYI: Webman is under active development so breaking changes may still occur. Don’t rely on this webman in production at least until a major release.
https://github.com/candrewlee14/webman