Comment by tetha

> There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.

This is what I was thinking - I'd say the biggest step up a developer can make is to recognize that sometimes you need a bit of one approach, sometimes a bit of another one.

Sometimes minimalism is the way, and you need to wonder if the pain, workload or lacking capabilities and features are problematic. Or, sometimes adding the smallest possible thing is a good way, as long as we don't paint ourself into a corner and enable learning and accumulating information of what we actually need.

Sometimes buying a thing is a good way, if you can find a good vendor and a tool fitting your use case and especially if the effort of doing it on your own is high. This commonly occurs in security, because keeping up to date with the ongoing vulnerability and threat landscape can be a full job on its own.

And sometimes adding something bigger is the way, if the effort of maintaining it are less than the effort and pain incurred by not having it. Or if we can ramp up the effort of the thing incrementally, while reaping benefits along the way. This can be validated often by doing a small thing.

What the AI will do in my opinion is to push the bar more in this direction. Cozily hacking CRUD-Code in a web server together most likely won't be enough in a year or two for the average development job.