For me, this is the kind of stuff I questioned in my first few years. After I productionalized a few real world systems for a business, the whole “dev street cred” thing lost it’s appeal. It wasn’t about some imaginary “dev purity” thing anymore, it was about being efficient and making sure I was contributing to the bottom line.
Computers aren’t digital pencil and paper. They’re levers for the mind. If the 3 GHz processor just sits there idling, waiting patiently to copy some bytes from one buffer to another, it’s being wasted. It could be checking the syntax, looking up documentation, or chasing memory references in the debugger so I don’t have to.
It always amuses me when HN users play Top Trumps with age. Reminds me of the "32 year veteran distinguished engineer level at FAANG" [1].
It's like whoever's the oldest wins. Bonus points if you mention you're a parent and lack the free time to use the more pernickety tools.
Though if I had to rate them I would put JetBrains IDEA at the top because the refactoring capabilities are so good.
From my point of view, ChatGPT is simply an anti-spam algorithm which is finally restoring "web search" back to being useful.
The problem is that there is no money in that. So, everybody is trying to apply all the ML/LLM/ChatGPT stuff to absolutely anything in the hopes of making some money.
For now, I imagine that advertisers are currently trying to find some way to adapt their platforms to have an LLM spit out their product via some paid prompt injection that a publisher can sell them.
The article just made me think of some devs that I’ve worked with that were obsessed with particular tooling (insert comment about a hammer and everything being a nail).
I do keep an eye on emacs. It turned into mainly my org-mode editor, but the v29 article that hit the HN front page recently has me curious about trying more dev work with it.
I just can't see a genuine reason to not use a real IDE and debugger. You can even fall back on the same tools you had before with them! Using a debugger doesn't mean you can't also use print statements, but if I could only have one I'd pick the debugger every time.
It's on the About page:
"I have been programming professionally for more than 30 years"