It's not the IDE adds difficult to read code. It's that it makes it easy to write difficult to read code. This is particularly visible in the Java world. For ex

It's not the IDE adds difficult to read code. It's that it makes it easy to write difficult to read code. This is particularly visible in the Java world. For example, the practice of dropping interfaces in front of everything never would have seemed reasonable if you didn't have an IDE that could do that with the click of a button, and the ability to quickly click through an interface to an implementation makes it relatively painless to work with. However, a person without access to an IDE is forced to use text searches to find implementations and has to keep in their head how all these interfaces and classes are organized. Similarly, IDEs make using complex method signatures tolerable with parameter hinting, makes finding method overrides trivial, and autocompletes all those long similar-sounding names like FooFactoryBuilderFacadeAdapter. In contrast, a developer writing code with a plain editor needs to remember everything and when that becomes difficult, the developer will be forced to either simplify things or encapsulate the complexity so they can forget about it. That code base will be easier to read without tooling because it was built to be understood that way. The developer also has to write each bit by hand, which gives time and motivation to wonder whether what they are writing is necessary. I could make a similar argument in the other direction as well. Code written by hand tends not to get refactored as much, tends to use too short variable names because of typing laziness, or inappropriate names because renaming variables is not trivial as it is in an IDE. I see the advantages of both, and I find myself preferring the sweet spot of intelligent editors that stop short of knowing everything about your code base.