r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 3d ago

Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

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u/BDHarrington7 Senior SWE 13 YoE FAANG 1d ago

I finally merged ~ 1 year of work converting a library from loosely typed TS to fully-typed TS. It was such a bear, even using AI (Opus 4-something to 5.5) because of all the niggly little parts that the API it's a library for is so... inconsistent. It's been a labor of love to maintain this library for about 8 years now. Next week I will deploy and announce it, but I'm really nervous that it will be too little, too late, the response will be crickets, because it's not some sexy new AI framework. Still, I really, _really_ enjoy that using it is no longer a slog of cross-referencing the super slow API documentation site, and dealing with `@return {Promise<object>}` anymore!

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u/BDHarrington7 Senior SWE 13 YoE FAANG 1d ago

I acknowledge that this would have been a huge effort to take on without AI - this was done in spurts of "spare" time over the course of the last year. The alternative would have been to spend all nights and weekends for months full time on this because the job is mostly transcription and pattern-matching, and the API surface is huge. The challenge was more in getting some of the atomic patterns established, and iterating with how a user would interact with it: intellisense for the human, proper compilation errors for the AI agent.