How I use my terminal

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.

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.

You sure? Programming is an act of creation. Any [good] creative worker - artists, sculptors, novelists, potters, bakers, et al. would agree that being an artist means finding joy in refining your technique, investing in your tools, searching for new recipes, and experimenting. Being a programmer is not about achieving better productivity percentages. As far as I know, most of the best-known programmers have never participated in competitive programming challenges. Tooling may not matter to building a product, yet the product is built by programmers, and tooling is very much everything to them. Good programmers do invest in their tooling, not because it's a universal rule they have to follow or because it gives them a competitive edge. They do it simply because they enjoy the process.

Though it's challenging to determine whether someone who loves exploring and refining their tools will excel in a specific team, one truth remains: those who don't engage with their tools likely aren't strong programmers, as they most likely fundamentally lack passion for programming itself.