Mastodawn

Is there any evidence that programmers are more productive when using IDEs? Fewer bugs, faster coding, minimal technical debt?

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Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him Jan 30

What is your comparison baseline?

I use emacs for small stuff and switch to IDEs for bigger things. So emacs is my baseline, though you could argue it is an IDE of itself.

I somewhat heavily use IDE features like "rename", "go to declaration", "find all uses", "move to base class". Doing any of these is faster with an IDE than it would be with emacs + grep.

Also, I'll do these more freely when in front of an IDE, resulting in better, cleaner code.

You didn't ask about AI, did you?

@vtrlx

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Victoria Lacroix Jan 30

@dj3ei You've again touched on what other replies have mentioned—IDEs make it easier to handle a larger amount of code, which means IDEs also make it easier to bloat one's projects with more code and more files. This creates a feedback loop where opting out of an IDE becomes increasingly difficult. Much like offloading your brain to an LLM, is the comparison I want to make.

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miraculous enbybug Feb 1

@vtrlx @dj3ei
What you’re saying is equivalent to «you should apply patch by hand because otherwise it makes you dependent on Git» or things like that.

Renaming something automatically is just removing tedious, deterministic work, without mistake; it has nothing to do with offloading a cognitive process onto an LLM???

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Victoria Lacroix Feb 1

@melunaka @dj3ei Renaming things is one of the things I find the least objectionable about IDEs, but because I don't often rename things I would almost certainly lose more time from the cognitive overload imposed by an IDE than I would save from being able to quickly rename variables/functions/types/etc.

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Victoria Lacroix Feb 1

@melunaka @dj3ei As for cognitive offloading, the features I usually think of are autocomplete and code suggestions.

In the future, consider interpreting unusual arguments in good faith instead of making highly questionable comparisons as you have.

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miraculous enbybug

@vtrlx @dj3ei
Depends what you mean by «IDE». Renaming stuff is something vim can do too, it doesn’t really add complexity to the editor itself, tho you might not prefer it or like how it works.

As for cognitive offloading, the features I usually think of are autocomplete and code suggestions.

I don’t know what’s code suggestions, I don’t use them. I don’t really see how autocomplete is different than going through docs manually (well I get some people could just use whatever seems to fit without really thinking, but people also copy-paste stuff from StackOverlow without thinking).

In the future, consider interpreting unusual arguments in good faith instead of making highly questionable comparisons as you have.

Well, I’m not sure how they’re «highly questionable»? I assure you I try to assume good faith, but I am annoyed by your initial comparison to using LLMs. I would argue that what bloats project is a capitalist culture more than features than automate deterministic work.