> How do we make tools that are powerful enough to enable us to do hard things, but wise enough to keep us from doing foolish things? Should we rely on our tool

> How do we make tools that are powerful enough to enable us to do hard things, but wise enough to keep us from doing foolish things? Should we rely on our tools to do this? IMO: No we shouldn't. And that's why I'm in the "Think about it yourself, bulid your ETL with a clean structure so you know what your 1,000 [SQL|shell] scripts do" in stead of the "Let your tool figure it out for you" one. > Is this an argument against centralization? Isn't that deeply inefficient? Or for centralization, if we hark back to the "You can get a loooong way on a single server" argument above. Depends on how you define "centralization", I suppose. (Seems to me everything always depends on your definitions, in the end.) But wait, does this still have anything to do with IDEs? As opposed to Vim (or, say, Notepad)? If so, I'd say IDEs also belong to the category good centralization. At least older ones, before they became desktoppified Web apps with baked-in AS (Artificial Stupidity)... > Honestly I struggle with this all the time. I've got the outlines of some ideas and there are some tech communities grappling with the same issues, but I think we're just at the very beginning of a rethink about how we do software. On that debate I'm not so much conservative as... Reactionary.