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441 points longcat | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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f311a ◴[] No.45038992[source]
People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.

This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simple, and everyone can understand the code. It just clears the terminal output and redraws it every second. It is also thread-safe. Took me 25 minutes to integrate it and review the code.

If you don't need a complex stats counter, a simple progress bar is like 30 lines of code as well.

This is a way to go for me now when considering another dependency. We don't have the resources to audit every package update.

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christophilus ◴[] No.45039724[source]
I’d like a package manager that essentially does a git clone, and a culture that says: “use very few dependencies, commit their source code in your repo, and review any changes when you do an update.” That would be a big improvement to the modern package management fiasco.
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1. k3nx ◴[] No.45040499[source]
That what I used git submodules for. I had a /lib folder in my project where the dependencies were pulled/checked out from. This was before I was doing CI/CD and before folks said git submodules were bad.

Personally, I loved it. I only looked and updating them when I was going to release a new version of my program. I could easily do a diff to see what changed. I might not have understood everything, but it wasn't too difficult to see 10-100 line code changes to get a general idea.

I thought it was better than the big black box we currently deal with. Oh, this package uses this package, and this package... what's different? No idea now, really.