DevToolsDigest: Issue #328

The Week in Developer Tools

How Core Git Developers Configure Git

What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? There are some settings that even the core developers change. Hopefully this will be a useful reference and maybe you'll learn some new Git config things, some of which should almost certainly already be the defaults, which isn’t even a controversial option in the Git mailing list community.

Reviewer First Pull Requests

Pull requests continue to be the primary mechanism by which we collaborate and contribute code. Despite this we often will put as little effort as possible into creating PRs. Even a small investment in improving them pays over-sized dividends to the project and your team members.

Programming with LLMs

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful.

Industry Research

How AI Changes Developers (And The Code They Write)

We’re at the "calculator phase" of AI in software. It’s helpful but we’re still doing things mostly the way we did before. Non-programmers use AI to write simple scripts they couldn’t tackle otherwise and experienced devs lean on it to crank through boilerplate code or debug faster. However, a deeper shift is coming.

Advancements in DevTools to Gain Performance Insights

The evolution of the web has required an evolution in debugging and ultimately, advancements in browser devtools. We have moved from the ability to observe what happens during, and after a page load, to determining user experience as well as render blocking interactions to name a few.

The Deep Research Problem

LLMs are not databases: they do not do precise, deterministic, predictable data retrieval, and it’s irrelevant to test them as though they could. But that’s not quite what we’re trying to do here - this is a rather more complex and interesting test.

Developer Venture News

Create & Share Custom AI Coding Assistants with Continue

Continue’s open-source offering has already built great momentum among the developer community with 20,000+ GitHub stars and more than 100,000 users. With the 1.0 launch, developers can not only build their own AI coding assistant to suit their specific preferences, but they can also get the higher-level controls and governance that teams and enterprises absolutely need to be successful.