As an enthusiast and a professional, I see a lot of people spending more time building a "better" set of tools and/or arguing about the merits of various trendy

As an enthusiast and a professional, I see a lot of people spending more time building a "better" set of tools and/or arguing about the merits of various trendy tools (hello HN) than actually writing code. If all you ever do is the same kind of thing over and over again (say, build CRUD web apps with the same stack), then sure, go nuts and optimize so you can deploy with a single button press from your IDE. But if you're in a role where the stuff you build varies wildly -- say, any type of startup where you are the dev team or a significant fraction of it -- then diminishing returns sets in very fast. Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/