Maybe. I have been developing for over 30 years. I still use emacs, use logs and printf for debugging, and have never even looked at ChatGPT. I'm willing to admit I may be set in my ways but I get my work done.
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.