Comment by spiderfarmer

I think they have some good points (having a deep understanding of tools you use), but I think the path they take achieve those results is misguided.

A stupid example off the top of my head: I use VSCode and often I'll use the integrated git commit feature. But if need to bisect, rebase, merge, or edit a commit, I will just use the CLI. I don't feel like using the commit GUI makes me worse at using git.

All in all, I think the author thinks that familiarity with one tool makes people worse at another similar tool, but I don't think that's the necessarily the case. At worst, memory might fade if the other tool isn't used, but that's fine, it's clearly not used often. As an analogy: if I don't speak German every day, I don't need to be fluent in German either.

Some of the older heads here are 100% with you, the notes and comments in this thread should be clear enough indication of that.

But you're right, tools that make short work of ridiculous incantations, 100% good.

We don't sit around trying to re-write arithmetic, but apparently not knowing how to do git pull --rebase is a crime to these smart folks, who don't seem to realize they know very little about getting sh!t done.

This, this and this. Having a person who constantly nags juniors about "true engineering" is such a morale killer.

Strange. Articles like this remind me never to hire vibe coding brogrammers who have no idea about basics such as cp, mv, find etc. Usually they leave behind a mess which soon breaks.

The cynical and pedantic engineers however, do excellent work, and their software never breaks. It takes longer, you pay a bit more, but it is worth every cent.