In my experience an IDE becomes a crutch for beginners to programming (and I reserve my right to change my opinion). IDEs helps new engineers by postponing hav

In my experience an IDE becomes a crutch for beginners to programming (and I reserve my right to change my opinion). IDEs helps new engineers by postponing having to learn high productivity command line tools like Bash and Git. I see this all the time with new engineers (read: bootcamp graduates) and it is expensive having to educate new employees about the context in which their IDE operates (whether that's locally, test, staging or production). The IDE's value-add also becomes more questionable when developing on more than one part of the stack (e.g. client + server-side code). There are also costs to vendor lock-in--no one should have to use your IDE to be able to contribute to your software. The IDE licensing business is a racket as evidenced by the JetBrains incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089 I think it's a good exercise to remind yourself: "what do I need beyond syntax-highlighting?" IMO, most IDE features are low value-add and do not increase productivity.