alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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>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.
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.
It is a little crazy to accuse people not using the dev tools you like of malpractice.
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.
what kind of noob uses debugger from within their IDE?
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.
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.