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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

TL/DR: I strongly encourage you to understand the fundamentals and not view all of our tools as black boxes, but once you have an understanding of the tools and the various layers of abstraction, feel free to use them to boost your productivity and output.

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This is equivalent to saying "to understand wood working, do not use power tools, use hand tools to understand the wood and the process."

Sure, if you want to artisan woodworking, sure skip power tools or at least try it for a while to get a deeper understanding.

It is no different than saying that programming languages hide the subtleties of the hardware and we should be using assembly.

But once you understand the fundamentals, if you want to get a lot done at low cost (e.g. a professional who delivers at scale), you definitely need to use the power tools (e.g. high level abstractions/automations) that boost productivity.

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Wrong way round.

git on the command line is the power tool. The VS Code plugin is the training wheels version.

These tools the TFA discuss are powerful, but have a learning curve. VS Code has a flatter learning curve, but it's up to you to decide if they are abstracting away things you actually need to understand.

All abstractions serve a purpose, but they're also always leaky. To extend your assembler analogy: sometimes you actually do need to understand what's happening on the stack and the heap, most people never do.

Use what works for you, but don't think that abstractions will be enough for every scenario, sometimes you're going to need to get under the hood and go deep, and if all you ever do is hand-wave it away and hope your IDE/framework/chosen programming language interpreter or compiler is going to just "sort it out" for you... well, good luck with that, and I hope it works out for you. It's just not my lived experience after 30+ years in the industry.

> git on the command line is the power tool. The VS Code plugin is the training wheels version.

I don't disagree with your underlying point, but git is perhaps the worst example. It is a horrible tool in several ways. Powerful yes, but it pays too large a price in UX.

I've only ever used git through the CLI as well, but having switched to jujutsu (also CLI) I am not going back. It is quite eye-opening how much simpler git should be, for the average user (I realize "average user" is doing some heavy-lifting here -- git covers an enormous number of diverse use cases).

What jujutsu-CLI is for me (version control UX that just works) might be VSCode's GUI git integration for other people, or magit, or GitButler, or whatever other GUI or TUI.

Who cares about training wheels? If the real deal is a unicycle with one pedal and no saddle, I will keep using training wheels, thank you very much.

> well, good luck with that, and I hope it works out for you. It's just not my lived experience after 30+ years in the industry.

Same level of experience I have btw.

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