They have, but they're beyond grasp of most developers.
Tests were invented to express the "why" for the normal guy. They don't strictly prevent compilation, but a proper workflow will see them halt your process in the same way, offering the same outcome.
Granted, there are a lot of horribly written tests out there that don't tell you "why" — or, well, anything. As always, people will find a way to abuse anything you put in front of them. But when used well...
With a test, it might link up some functionality with "why" and pass, but then what happens if a business requirement just isn't a requirement anymore? The test will still pass. I'm thinking of something sillier, like a language that forces you to justify why for your code, and then regularly quizzes you if the business reasoning is still true. If anything changes, it rips out the code and breaks your site. :) So then you have to go in to fix it.
I'd also love it if this were applied to politics and laws.
Having the source lets you fix something for yourself, there are an increasing number of barriers being put up to prevent you submitting a fix upstream.
Going through this right now with part of libpng, their mailing list doesn't seem to like my email.
Using a source-based distro (previously Gentoo, now NixOS) lets me solve the problem for myself, even if my PR never gets accepted. Right now the count is at 4 patches in software I use that I submitted upstream that were (for one reason or another) never accepted.
In at least one case, I later found out that I was not the only person to submit a fix for the problem I was running into, but their discussion on the ML also went without comment 3 years earlier.
I feel like they had to keep it in the incubator for a little longer but the idea of a zero config twm is a thing I could pay for if my config ever crashes and burns.
JuiceSSH + tailscale has been my go-to. I ssh into my dev workstation that always has a tmux sessions for all of my projects. Its the fastest way to get the same environment from a non-desktop location.
I think the most annoying part is when a coding agent takes a particularly long time to produce something. AND has bad output, it is such a time sink / sunk cost
If all you need is a good starting point, why not just use a framework or library?
Popular libraries/frameworks that have been around for years and have hundreds of real engineers contributing, documenting issues, and fixing bugs are pretty much guaranteed to have code that is orders of magnitude better than something that can contain subtle bugs and that they will have to maintain themselves if something breaks.
In this very same post, the user mentions building a component library called Astrobits. Following the link they posted for the library’s website, we find that the goal is to have a "neo-brutalist" pixelated 8-bit look using Astro as the main frontend framework.
This goal would be easily accomplished by just using a library like ShadCN, which also supports Astro[1], and has you install components by vendoring their fully accessibility-optimized components into your own codebase. They could then change the styles to match the desired look.
Even better, they could simply use the existing 8-bit styled ShadCN components[2] that already follow their UI design goal.
I think AI makes personal software possible in a way that it wasn't before. Without LLMs, I would have never had the time to build a component library at all and would have probably used 8bitcn (looks awesome btw) and added the neo-brutalist shadows I wanted.
However, despite my gripes with ShadCN for Astro being minor (lots of deps + required client:load template directive), just small friction points are enough that I'm willing to quickly build my own project. AI makes it barely any work, especially when I lower the variance using parallelization.
Frameworks and libraries are useful to keep the code style the same.
Using multiple agents helps when the endgoal isn't seen. Especially if there is no end state UI design in mind. I've been using a similar method for shopify polaris[1] putting the building blocks together (and combing through docs to find the correct blocks) is still a massive chore.
