The joys of not having to manage configuration
One of my least favourite activities associated with programming has always been configuration management. Each tool and platform has its own config file format (JSON, YAML, custom scripting lang, ...) with a different naming convention (._rc, ._.conf, ._config`, ...) in a different location with weird obtuse setting names and values (only a slight exaggeration). This is a natural consequence of the organic evolution of unix tooling over >30 years, and in many ways is a testament to the long lives of many of the tools I use every day (e.g. git, vim). But it does did make getting things "just so" a slow and brittle process.
However, these days I just have a dotfiles repo where all my config files live, plus a install.sh script that symlinks them to the correct places. Nothing novel here, but crucially I can adjust them entirely by describing what I want in natural language to the magic that is claude code, and my tools magically do what I want. E.g. "please adjust vimdiff to make the colours more readable in a light-mode terminal". "Make vim stop trying to autocomplete my markdown docs" etc. This has been a phenomenal quality of life improvement.
My general thoughts and feelings towards agentic programming tools are more mixed (and anxious), but this at least is one purely positive takeaway I can bask in for now (ignoring any complicated questions about where did the training data come from etc.)