Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?

I think automatic code formatters have huge impact.

Not just to save time on manually formatting code, they also flag syntax errors; if it doesn’t format on save you know something is wrong.

In team context they take away all bike shedding about formatting. Code reviews can focus more on stuff that matters, not just silly formatting tweaks.

To me a good formatter is as essential as autocomplete.

If delivering quality software is of essence, then investing in CI and automated tests will have an outsized impact as the project evolves.

And read The Pragmatic Programmer (which may be in need of a newer edition).

It takes some time to get used to, but systems that support image-based development, in the tradition of the Smalltalks and some Lisps, can boost programming productivity a lot, by allowing very tight feedback loops. Combined with a good debugger it makes much easier to diagnose and recover from problems, and iterate over your design quickly. To experience the state of the art on this front, I recommend Pharo. There's even a MOOC at https://mooc.pharo.org/

I'm not sure if it's a method, but understanding what bottlenecks are involved in your development cycle is key to anything involving efficiency. Just like early optimization of software it's very easy to add a step on a complicated system only to find out it wasn't very effective because there wasn't a problem there to be solved.

You need a way to evaluate efficiency and trends of your development cycle. Are you creating more tasks than are done? Are there too many bugs being created? Is the layout design often late and blocking your developers? Ask yourself how would you know about these things and if you don't have an answer or it takes a while to get the answer then that's where you should focus your improvements: optimizing your understanding of what is going on your value stream.

OpenAPI: while it's got tons of warts and is mostly useful for deterministic REST-ish looking APIs, it's the best think I've found so far to specify APIs. If the APIs are well expressed and maintained there tend to be a lot of positive side effects.