You Need to Ditch VS Code

A stupid example off the top of my head: I use VSCode and often I'll use the integrated git commit feature. But if need to bisect, rebase, merge, or edit a commit, I will just use the CLI. I don't feel like using the commit GUI makes me worse at using git.

All in all, I think the author thinks that familiarity with one tool makes people worse at another similar tool, but I don't think that's the necessarily the case. At worst, memory might fade if the other tool isn't used, but that's fine, it's clearly not used often. As an analogy: if I don't speak German every day, I don't need to be fluent in German either.

One of the primary things shells are supposed to excel at is file system navigation and manipulation, but the experience is horrible. I can never get `cp`, `rsync`, `mv`, `find` right without looking them up, despite trying to learn. It's way too easy to mess up irreversibly and destructively.

One example is flattening a directory. You accidentally git-cloned one too deep, into `some/dir/dir/` and want to flatten contents to `some/dir/`, deleting the then-empty `some/dir/dir/`. Trivial and reversible in any file manager, needlessly difficult in a shell. I get it wrong all the time.

Similarly, iterating over a list of files (important yet trivial). `find` is arcane in its invocation, differs between Unix flavors, you will want `xargs` but `{}` substitution is also very error-prone. And don't forget `print0`! And don't you even dare `for f in *.pdf`, it will blow up in more ways than you can count. Also prepare to juggle quotes and escapes and pray you get that right. Further, bash defaults are insane (pray you don't forget `set -euo pipefail`).

How can we be failed by our tools so much, for these use cases? Why aren't these things trivial and safe?

For decades embedded CPU companies would look at visual studio and say, "Boy howdee if we only had visual studio for our chips!" But they wouldn't be willing to put in the effort to do so, so they'd start with Eclipse, and the C/C++ plugin, and hack in a JTAG interface, and maybe a few code generators to pin out the hardware and say, look at us we made an IDE! And that IDE sucked, not because of eclipse, but because nobody actually put the work in to make it useful. You'd get lime breakpoints but not memory breakpoints or function breakpoints. You'd get a call stack but no way to inspect your RTOS. Every chip vendor did it themselves, so every tool was wildly different even for a big standard ARM core.

VSCode for embedded is the same thing, just in JavaScript. With AI!