Comment by xmprt
5 hours ago
This joke is made a lot but I think most good developers take care in considering the npm dependencies they install. You can get a ton of dependencies pretty easily by just installing very popular ones like react, tailwind, nextjs, etc. If there's ever a dependency that I'm not familiar with then I make sure to take at least a cursory look over the repo to make sure it has a decent number of stars/community, is well maintained, has multiple contributors, etc.
That is great, but the reality is that your OS, the productivity software you use daily, and the dependencies downstream of the ones you review, are not actually being checked by you for code quality.
Part of using software is just going off how well it works.
When one Linux flavor starts to have issues, most people don't do a dissection on why, they just switch distros. Or web browsers (I've lost count of the back-and-forth between FF and Chrome performance over the years, nevermind all their precursors). Or office suites.
Pretending that the code is what really matters, and not what the code does, is elevating the paint quality over the painting.
I didn't mention the code once in my reply. Code is only one aspect of reviewing a dependency. Much more important is the community and support around the tool/dependency.
When dealing with LLM output, you're getting a 1 of 1. There's no way to measure the community, number of contributors, or how maintainable it is.
Beyond ongoing support, community/number of contributors doesn't indicate anything, though?
And maintainability is a function of code, as it relates to humans, so it is a measure of the code itself.
One of the things I've actually seen companies considering (due to supply chain compromise attacks), is not just having an in-house package repo that trails public versions, but instead fully in-housing critical dependencies and essentially making them private forks that they (probably use LLMs to) maintain.
Basically cutting out the Chainguard-like companies that made private deps their business model.
Honestly, I see good points in both of your comment sets.
But there really is a floor on how deeply a person can understand their own software. There has to be a "good enough" somewhere. As a C# dev, I can understand my entire codebase pretty deeply. And I've read enough of the .NET Core framework to understand some of the nuances of how a lot of the methods we rely on every day are implemented. But I've never once looked at the CIL that Roslyn has produced, and certainly not inspected the machine code that the runtime has compiled. I can't read or write Assembly. I don't really know anything about the x86 or ARM instruction sets. My understanding of the CPU is barely better than "it's transistors," and even lower than that, I have a vague awareness that neutrinos from space can flip bits and there are error correcting mechanisms for that, but I have no idea how they work. And yet, I'm able to write fast and reliable software.
There are super knowledgeable devs out there who pretty much DO understand the whole thing, but it's impossible to memorize every line of every version of framework that you're using or the unique alterations and upgrades to every piece of silicon that your program will run on, and as you guys pointed out, proprietary operating systems are basically completely opaque to our understanding.
So the question is really "where is the practical floor that you stand on?" And for me, personally, there is room for at least some areas of code at the application level that I'm OK with never having read myself.
>> I think most good developers take care in considering the npm dependencies they install
Evidence?!
No they don’t - developers just fly past installing whatever they need to make the damn thing work.
They don’t sit there thinking carefully about what each dependency means.
I think the person above is stating that this is distinguishing characteristic of "good" developers. By extension, the ones you are referring to are not good.