🧠 AI's biggest weakness

and developer philosophy

Author

Journals GG
February 10, 2025

Hey there.

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

Frontend Focus

⌨️ Single Responsibility Principle in React
The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is all about keeping things simple: every class or component should have just one reason to change. This blog dives into common SRP pitfalls and offers actionable tips like separating data from presentation, using hooks for logic, and creating focused components that do one thing well.

đź–– Vite with TypeScript
Robin Wieruch’s latest blog offers a quick guide on upgrading a Vite project from JavaScript to TypeScript. Starting with a React project already set up in Vite, the tutorial walks you through installing TypeScript and its dependencies via the command line. The process is straightforward, making it easy to integrate TypeScript into your workflow.

🖼️ The Mistakes of CSS
Ever looked at a CSS property and thought, "Why?" You’re not alone! Born in 1996, CSS was designed to style documents, not to handle the complex tasks we demand of it nearly 30 years later. If we had a time machine, many things could’ve been designed to make more sense.

Programming

🧠 AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive
A blog on Gauge.sh challenges the idea that AI reduces the relevance of tech debt. While AI makes coding and cleanup faster, it actually increases the cost of carrying tech debt. Generative AI widens the gap in productivity between low-debt and high-debt codebases. Companies with clean, young code thrive with AI tools, while those with messy, legacy systems face even greater struggles. The takeaway? Tech debt penalties are higher than ever in the AI era.

🤔 Developer philosophy
A senior developer shared some invaluable philosophies for better coding. Key takeaways include: avoid the temptation of a ground-up rewrite, aim to be 90% done with 50% of the time, and automate good practices wherever possible. Additionally, always consider pathological data and write code that’s testable.

🧑‍💼 7 proven mental models for engineering managers
As managers, we can’t A/B test decisions, but mental models—“thinking power-ups”, can help prevent big mistakes. These tools shift perspectives, enabling better decisions and creative solutions. This article covers 7 key mental models for engineering managers, including Inversion, Second-Order Thinking, Bottlenecks, and Hanlon’s Razor.

Tools

AI