Here's what makes developer tools hard: 1. IDE dependency. If you have to use IDE X to get the feature, then your tool will live and die by IDE X. A lot of dev

Here's what makes developer tools hard: 1. IDE dependency. If you have to use IDE X to get the feature, then your tool will live and die by IDE X. A lot of development tools lose their user base when an IDE or editor falls out of favor. 2. Language/compiler specificity. This one is rough, because most dev tools are dependent on language tooling to do the magic. Productivity hitches are different in different languages. In a day, I may work with Python, Go, JavaScript, SQL, bash/zsh and several DSLs. If your tool doesn't work with 2-3 languages I use, I may never even notice your tool. A lot of static analysis based tools work well with C and Java and nothing else. It's kind of the SmallTalk trap: amazing tools, but you have to use SmallTalk to use them. 3. Solving stuff that really doesn't matter to the programmer. As a manager and as a business owner a 15% in developer productivity is great. As a programmer, I'm not even going to notice that I'm getting 15% more done. And even if I do, it may not even matter.