The primary value of IDEs in the agentic era are: debugging, code review (with good diffing), and management of the agent’s context. I also use mine for browsing databases, but not everyone does that.
You seem to have one of those three. I’m not sure what your coding background is, but debuggers/profilers are incredibly useful and important, and it’s essentially malpractice for a developer never to use them.
Such a cringy and unpleasant statement... OP is smart to adjust to change. I have hand-written software for the past 30 years, and the moment I stop using my IDE, you’d tell me don’t know what I am doing?? Dude, I probably was writing assembly code by hand when there were no IDEs and you were still trying to figure out the taste of Play-Doh. Some people really need to put their head in the right place.
This response is so strange and unrelated to what I wrote, it feels like you're not even responding to me in the first place.
> OP is smart to adjust to change
When did I tell OP not to change? My comment was about how my own workflow has changed radically in the last couple of years.
> the moment I stop using my IDE, you’d tell me don’t know what I am doing??
What? I didn't do anything of the sort.
> Dude, I probably was writing assembly code by hand when there were no IDEs and you were still trying to figure out the taste of Play-Doh
This is incredibly childish. If you really are as old as you imply, the cringe is all you, friend.
>but debuggers/profilers are incredibly useful and important, and it’s essentially malpractice for a developer never to use them.
Just wait for the moment you need to write code for an embedded platform that doesn't have a debugging mechanism.
I've been programming for more than 30 years. Funnily, I used to use debuggers A LOT (in Borland Turbo C++ DOS "IDE" times, Visual Basic, Eclipse, Netbeans, Adobe Flash Builder, etc). But nowadays I seldomly use the debugger, if at all.
Haha I loved Netbeans, and in college(UK not US) got to the point when I taught actionscript instead of the teacher.
> Just wait for the moment you need to write code for an embedded platform that doesn't have a debugging mechanism.
Very close to 0% of programmers on this site are doing this. The vast majority are writing JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or some other high-level language and targeting web platforms.
> But nowadays I seldomly use the debugger, if at all.
That might be fine for you and your use cases, but it's not fine for CRUD app developers who are essentially passing and mutating data around databases and state machines.
>That might be fine for you and your use cases, but it's not fine for CRUD app developers who are essentially passing and mutating data around databases and state machines.
I've done a mixed bag of these, but yep ultimately mainly just CRUD now days and yep that's all we're doing. It's what a lot of us are doing!
It is a little crazy to accuse people not using the dev tools you like of malpractice.
"Debugger" is not just a "dev tool I like." It's the only way to see what a program is doing while it's doing it, unless you're just writing to your console and hoping you captured enough state with your write statements.
I understand there are people who haven't used debuggers before and don't know what they're missing out on, but there's no excuse for that anymore because it's become much easier to set them up and use them.
Hey! I'm a web and mobile developer for past 12 years and have wrote quite a lot of code over the years (github for receipts). I actually even written a mobile application profiler, it's on GitHub.
Debugging and profiling has always been outside of the IDE for me, except when I started out as a Java Developer.
My point was not at all to accuse you of using the wrong tools, but rather to point out that your rebuilt IDE is missing something very valuable (combining the debugging and editing experience).
I don't and have never understood why someone spins up a full-weight IDE and then not used that same GUI to manage their debugger, since you get a lot of added benefits from that (being able to copy/paste from the editor to code evaluation/REPL for example).
I wasn't trying to criticize this early work at all. It looks like a fun and promising project!
Hey, no worries, I don't think you were criticising! I guess this IDE was prominently started for me, and I wouldn't use an internal debugger vs debugging in Chrome for example. I think if I added one, the debugger would be opt-in/installable rather than always bundled.
Woah woah, temper down the assertion my friend!
Profiling is a tool meant for processes that relate to performance, or hot spots. Debuggers when integrated well[1], are great tools but compete with print based debugging which is a much more general skill one uses and needs to learn.
Let's reserve malpraxis considerations for writing code without any true thought given for security, privacy, accessibility and human rights affected.
[1] and I don't like the interface of any of the debuggers I used. Except maybe in ghci, if I had the patience to script a Tcl/Tk frontend one day.
I got out of the habit of leaning on debuggers with first making sure I'm not lacking in logging. I can't remember the last time I actually needed to set a break point.
what kind of noob uses debugger from within their IDE?