I believe it's a question of how good the tools are. If you're "using the tools directly", you probably don't have much knobs to fiddle with and everything eith

I believe it's a question of how good the tools are. If you're "using the tools directly", you probably don't have much knobs to fiddle with and everything either works by default or does not work because of some well-known and searchable reason, e.g. "you Java source file should have the same name as the only public class". However, if try some higher-level tools, they may: * Try to guess your preferred options and guess incorrectly. * Hide some low-level details which actually matter in your specific case. * Provide error messages that are not easy to look up because the tool itself is not as popular as its lower-level counterpart For example, I found Eclipse (GUI) and Gradle (CLI) very frustrating to use, but IntelliJ (GUI) and Maven (CLI) worked wonderfully for me. The only downside of Maven comparing to pure javac for me was that it needed some boilerplate config. Other than that, it felt magical.