A good dev can produce excellent results rapidly in an entirely "naked" environment. Sure, good tools might help, but you're looking at improvements in the margins - and a lot of this is about your personal joy, not productivity.
If the rate at which you generate value is noticeably gated by which IDE you use... well, you've got a long and exciting journey ahead of you. It's going to be fun, and I don't mean that facetiously.
"knowing your tools" was never called "being a programmer". Best devs I've ever worked with all did absolutely amazing work with more/grep/vi and a lot of thinking. And the thinking is where the value was created. That's still true, even if you throw an LLM into the mix.
I completely agree that being comfortable with basic tools is critical to a versatile software professional because you're routinely in situations where you don't have your kit with you, for every tool on that list there is a GNU userland equivalent that's had basically the same core behavior since the 90s and I switched from DOS and Windows to Linux and GNU, and I am routinely glad that I know how to write useful `find` and `awk` and all that because I'm trying to get some box brought up.
I'm not knocking the classic tooling, it was designed by geniuses who obsessed about tools and tools that build tools (everyone from Ken Thompson to John Carmack are on the record about the importance of tooling).
It's the stock VSCode and Cursor people with an extension or two that are accepting a totally voluntary handicap. Someone in the thread called me a "shell bro", and I mean, that's just asking to get rocked if it's ever on the line against someone serious.
A good dev can produce excellent results rapidly in an entirely "naked" environment. Sure, good tools might help, but you're looking at improvements in the margins - and a lot of this is about your personal joy, not productivity.
If the rate at which you generate value is noticeably gated by which IDE you use... well, you've got a long and exciting journey ahead of you. It's going to be fun, and I don't mean that facetiously.
"knowing your tools" was never called "being a programmer". Best devs I've ever worked with all did absolutely amazing work with more/grep/vi and a lot of thinking. And the thinking is where the value was created. That's still true, even if you throw an LLM into the mix.