I started with Q-Basic about 30 years ago, which came with an IDE which was as powerful as Textedit or Nano. No auto-completion, no refactoring, nothing. Then c

I started with Q-Basic about 30 years ago, which came with an IDE which was as powerful as Textedit or Nano. No auto-completion, no refactoring, nothing. Then came Delphi, MS Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Eclipse, IntelliJ/AppCode/Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio Code - all in that order. I came to realize that the more the IDE did for me the worse I became as a programmer! Today I’m back to plain text editing with a powerful text manipulation tool - (Neo)Vim. And I program like back in the 90s — I have all file names, methods, the complete code structure of _all_ products and services of our company on my mind. I can see the final solution in my mind before I start typing a single letter. Refactoring is done with regex, it works the same in all programming languages. I work full stack. And I’m really fast. And I’m not tired by having all code and APIs in my mind. Because programming is pure joy again for me. Pure text editing is what makes me fast and having tons of fun. I ship so fast and things very rarely break. Bugs are fixed within minutes because I see the root causes flashing up in my mind. To me IDEs are for intermediate programmers. It’s a good thing to temporarily improve your skills but I don’t see them as a means to achieve mastery, at least not for the mastery that I could achieve.