The way Git took over wasn't Git vs Mercurial (although that was a small part of it), but much more Git vs SVN, CVS, and people that never used source control before. It's similar to how Chrome became the dominant browser over Firefox. It was much more converts from Internet Explorer and Safari than advanced users that were already on Firefox.
That is an important point: in 2005 "all code must be in version control" was still a controversial idea, particularly for companies that made software but were not "tech" companies. A lot of git's expansion came from teams putting their software in a VCS for the first time.
This is something I notice often when using these tools (if this is what you are referring too). Like they will grep entire code bases to search for a word rather than search by symbol. I suppose they don't care to fix these types of things as it all adds up to paid tokens in the end.
We have 50 years worth of progress on top of grep and grep is one of the worse ways to refactor a system.
Nice to see LLM companies are ignoring these teachings and speed running into disaster.
Only if they are not told how to search the codebase efficiently. All you need is an MCP server for code search. There's even LSP backed MCP servers now.
I see, I'm highly skeptical of using these tools because I honestly feel faster with a vim + clt workflow if I know what to write.
I'll have to check again because 6 months ago this stuff was pure trash and more frustrating than useful (beyond a boilerplate generate that also boils the ocean).
Yes, check again - to be blunt, any opinions (at least tactical on how well feature X works) formed 6 months ago are not really relevant to the conversation today given how fast this is all moving.
Opus 4.5 in Claude Code is a massive jump over 4.0 which is a massive jump over 3.7.
Each generation is being fine-tuned on a huge corpus of freshly-generated trajectories from the previous generation so things like tool use improve really quickly.
Using Grep or regex is textual refactoring. If you want to rename every reference to a type Foo, how do you is that without touching any variables named foo, or any classes named FooBar
The answer is use tools that have semantic info to rename things.
Another poster mentioned using symbols and references, another way to refactor code programmatically is to make use of code mods. Code mods are very powerful and this is a use case where I find LLMs to shine as the various syntax and language ASTs are hard to remember (even if you do understand what you're doing).
I'm reading HN on my laptop outside, and a ladybug landed on my screen right as I was reading this comment. It's sitting there as I write this. I know this doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way but it's so neat I just needed to share.
Fair, but I've been following Andreas Kling since he started (publically) with SerenityOS back a couple years ago, and he's a real hacker -- as real as they come.
I've watched hours of how he works on YouTube, it's fantastic, if anyone can lead a browser team, its him.
Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.
Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.
This is true.
> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.
This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.
> This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Yes, I work for MoCo.
> Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals.
But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector.
> This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!)
The only issue is that Firefox on mobile is visibly breaking a couple of sites every now and then; if you can put up with that for no ads (I can), then its great.
Firefox users are people who would use LibreWolf, but installed it, tried it, saw it doesn't have dark mode, and figured that Firefox was good enough after all.
Yes, but its incredibly dangerous when the operator of the token predictor can give you, personally, different behavior and can influence your decisions even more directly than before.
I hate to be that guy, but I am having a difficult time verifying any of this. How likely is it that this is entirely hallucinated? Can anyone independently verify this?
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