While developing, we see red underlines for errors, yellow for warnings, and angry compiler messages. Success is merely the absence of problems. This creates a negative feedback loop that can make programming feel even more tedious and draining. Development tools feel like a courtrooms. But they don't have to. Fixing a bug, passing all tests, aligning with style guides, or writing clean, readable code rarely gets celebrated.
I challenge you to change that. I invite you to design and prototype positive reinforcement in development environments. For us, developers.
Think: a sparkle when your linter or prettier go silent, a smooth pulse on successful build, confetti in the terminal after a clean CI run, or just a little green highlight for mere couple hundred milliseconds once you fixed syntax error and red highlight went away. Most obvious format: VS Code extension hooking to Language Server Protocol. Other plugins for other environments or just CLI are a nice bonus.
If we want to go further: good teachers use not just the red pen to highlight mistakes, but green one to highlight especially good pieces. Let's adapt the same principle for IT students: if some piece of code is especially nice/clever, AI (why not throw AI in and may be even an MCP server) could highlight that. Positive reinforcement feels much better than just the absence of punishment... or at least it should.