To elaborate on my previous post: yes, I consider linters and type checkers to be debugging tools. uv, which I see a lot of hand-wringing about is an even more inexplicable tool to me. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I cannot see why I need the world’s fastest dependency installer. I hate dependencies!

But it does so much more I hear you say! It is also an upload tool, edits your project files, and is a bicycle seat cover. And yet I could do all of those things before it existed. I do not want the new hotness. I want to know that the things I use are universal and constant. If I can reasonably code with just my mind and an editor that is how I want to work.

Is this a devops thing? We have become obsessed with making tools instead of making things. You may be angry at AI but, as a profession, we have been automating away our expertise for decades and calling it progress.

Actually, I think it’s an “efficiency” and “productivity” thing. We have constructed a society that values production above all else. To me, finding a bug by patient study *is* programming. You might say I have wasted my time when an automatic tool might have found it in moments, but I would not have become a better programmer by using it. We have made our discipline a chore instead of a craft.