I prefer a pretty minimal dev setup. I strip as much away from my editors, browsers, everything as much as possible. I don't want a bunch of icons and other things cluttering up my visual space. With that, one of first things I do on any new Mac is make sure I don't see anything on my desktop. This can be done with a few really simple terminal commands:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false
killall FinderIf later you decide you want to bring them back. No worries. Just do the opposite:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop true
killall Finder
Clean 🤘