←back to thread

538 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
benreesman ◴[] No.44358830[source]
This is a nice setup. It's got tmux and fzf and rg and zoxide and clean-looking nvim. I'd recommend atuin, starship, bat, glow, duf, dogdns, viddy, gum/sesh, dust, btop et all if you don't have them, there's a long tail. The Awesome Terminal XYZ lists on Github have them all.

atuin is make-or-break, its a bigger deal than zoxide and being a coder without zoxide is like being an athlete with shoes for a different sport.

asciinema is a better way to do terminal videos.

Its weird that this is weird now: having your tools wired in used to be called "being a programmer". VSCode and Zed and Cursor and shit are useful additions to the toolbox, you gotta know that stuff by heart now too and you have to know which LLM to use for what, but these things are the new minimum, they aren't a replacement for anything. Even with Claude Code running hot at 4am when the PID controller is wide open, sometimes its going to trash your tree (and if it doesnt youve got it on too short a leash to be faster than gptel) and without magit? gl.

If you think you're faster than OP with stock Cursor? Get them to make a video of how to use an LLM with chops.

replies(4): >>44359187 #>>44359220 #>>44360720 #>>44361128 #
kragen ◴[] No.44359187[source]
Being a programmer is not about configuring your development environment. It never has been. I know a relatively accomplished programmer whose preferred development environment is Unix with the ex editor, and plenty of beginners whose whizbang IDEs completely fail to compensate for their lack of understanding.

That's not to say that tooling doesn't matter at all. Just that, historically, it's been a relatively minor factor. Maybe LLMs have changed that, or are about to.

An athlete with shoes for a different sport might run 5% slower. In a winner-takes-all competitive environment, that's fatal; a sprinter that ran 5% slower than the gold medalist is just another loser. Most programmers, however, win by collaboration, and on a relatively smooth fitness landscape, not a winner-takes-all spike. Even in winner-takes-all regions like startups, failure always results from bigger errors. I think nobody has ever said, "My startup would have succeeded if we'd used Dvorak keyboards instead of QWERTY", or vim instead of VSCode, or vice versa. It's always things like feuding cofounders, loss of motivation, never finding product-market fit, etc.

replies(6): >>44359633 #>>44359847 #>>44360078 #>>44360254 #>>44360492 #>>44360591 #
1. smlavine ◴[] No.44359847[source]
Being a programmer is absolutely about knowing how to configure your development environment, though.