A proper IDE can go a long way towards understanding a large codebase. It will be able to index everything so you can really quickly jump around the project–bei

A proper IDE can go a long way towards understanding a large codebase. It will be able to index everything so you can really quickly jump around the project–being able to jump directly from a method call to its declaration without momentarily context switching to search for where it lives is very valuable. As you start to add to a project the IDE can also prove valuable in discovering how everything fits together, since it will provide smart and helpful completions with docstrings, method signatures, types etc. This can really help you start writing new code a lot faster. Also, an IDE will usually also have a decent UI for running the code with a debugger attached, which can be incredibly useful for understanding the changing state of a running program.