Comment by alentred

In the past I have been training in a coding "bootcamp" for a while. I insisted that people new to coding use a plain text editor, like Notepad on Windows, no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete, nothing, and a command line to lint and compile the code. I only introduced the IDEs much much later, closer to the end of the bootcamp. First, I confirm that it is perfectly possible to complete rather complex projects this way. Secondly, I have no ground truth to compare my results with, but I know that most of the students appreciated the fact that they do not depend on the IDE/LSP/Copilot that much and developed their own understanding of how the things work.

I don't advocate to do the same outside of the learning process, of course. The tools help a lot (in fact, LSPs are awesome), but there are two principles that are important here I think:

- having an understanding of the underlying code, language, etc.

- being intentional about the use of the tools (e.g., invoking auto-complete with a keystroke vs an endless suggestions list; running a linter explicitly vs a code bloated with "insights" and "warning highlights", etc.)