Stripe had invested a lot in dev experience over the years precisely because of how "unique" some of the technology choices were: Mongo and originally normal Ruby for a system that mainly deals with money? Without a massive test suite, letting a normal dev make changes without a lot of rails is asking for a sea of incidents. If I recall correctly, the parallelization needed to run the unit tests for developers used to make the cost of continuous integration higher than the cost of the rest of the ec2 instances. Add the dev boxes, as trying to put a useful test environment in a laptop became unreasonable, and they already start with a pile of guardrails tooling that other companies never even needed. A hassle for years, but now a boon, as the guardrails help the LLMs.

It'd be nice to get an old school, stripey blog post, the kind that has a bit less fluff, and is mostly the data you'd all have put in the footnotes of the shipped email. Something that actually talks about the difficulties, instead of non-replicable generalities. After all, if one looks at the stock price, it's not as if competitors are being all that competitive lately, and I don't think it's mainly the details of the AI that make a difference. It'd also be nice to hear what goes one when not just babysitting minions, if there's actually anything else a dev is doing nowadays. AI adoption has changed the day to day experience within the industry, as most managers don't seem to know which way is up. So just explaining what days look like today might even sell as a recruiting initiative.