There should be an updated article, "Does Visual Studio Code Rot the Mind?"
In the old days, when we set our development environments up by hand, you usually ended up learning quite a bit about your setup. Or you at least had to know things like what's installed, what paths are where, blah blah.[1]
With Visual Studio Code being what almost everyone uses these days, everything is a click-to-install plugin. People don't realize Python isn't part of Visual Studio Code. The same for gcc, ssh, etc. You end up with tickets like "Can't run Python", or "Can't connect to the server", but it's all Visual Studio Code issues.
[1]: And yes, I realize a lot of us didn't know what we were doing back then, and the shotgun approach of "`apt-get install foobar` fixed this for me!" was a standard 'solution'
My background is heavily biased towards C++ but I don't really feel like you can make it work in VS Code without understanding, at minimum, where your clangd is actually located. The C++ plugins don't install what you need where you need them, and the launch.json really does not just work. My ex was unable to set up a C++26 toolchain for VS Code because without my help he couldn't configure the settings to connect to the right version of clang tools, and I don't think he ever got the GDB debug adapter working at all.
> One of the definite positives of AI is that kind of stuff is now fairly easy to solve.
I agree that 'AI' feels like a fancier/faster 'Google' (I've done the thing where I find a Github issue from 4 years ago that explains the problem), but when we will see a local AI agent that looks at your current configuration/issue and solves the problem for you, and then gives you a summary of what it did?
I get that and I also couldn’t get a boilerplate Vue/TypeScript library project started using AI - bear in mind any guide I could find was at least a year old and by now things have changed enough that none of them work either, but it was overall frustrating for something that should be simple
The number of times I've had to help a colleague troubleshoot some VSCode thing seems to bear this out. I'm regarded as a 'wizard' because I actually know how to use git/build tools without a gui. It's kind of shocking to me how many developers' knowledge ends at the run button.
It doesn't bother me too much, because I like being needed, lol. But it would probably make our team more productive if people bothered to learn how our tooling works.
Yeah I remember early in my career, all the older people lived on the command line. I'd learned enough command line stuff an university to keep up and eventually become like that, but I now see people older than me clicking their way through everything.
my version of this was "do convenient linux distros and binary package managers rot the mind?" after setting up a freebsd box with everything built from source and everything configured by hand. then again from building an arch-based Linux system from the wiki. you learn a lot from doing things by hand... but eventually you need to get stuff done.
In the old days, when we set our development environments up by hand, you usually ended up learning quite a bit about your setup. Or you at least had to know things like what's installed, what paths are where, blah blah.[1]
With Visual Studio Code being what almost everyone uses these days, everything is a click-to-install plugin. People don't realize Python isn't part of Visual Studio Code. The same for gcc, ssh, etc. You end up with tickets like "Can't run Python", or "Can't connect to the server", but it's all Visual Studio Code issues.
[1]: And yes, I realize a lot of us didn't know what we were doing back then, and the shotgun approach of "`apt-get install foobar` fixed this for me!" was a standard 'solution'