Comment by spiderfarmer
2 hours ago
"You should not let your IDE do the thinking for you"
As a solo entrepreneur, if something enables me to execute faster, I'll gladly use it. Articles like this only remind me to never (again) hire expensive, pedantic, over-principled and cynical engineers.
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.
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.
This, this and this. Having a person who constantly nags juniors about "true engineering" is such a morale killer.