Every code editor starts out as a friend. Take VS Code and PyCharm as examples: in their early days, they were the tool you actually wanted. Open it up, write some code, and it mostly stayed out of your way. Accessible, quick, and forgiving of the beginner who didn’t yet know what a linter was, let alone whether they wanted one.
Then comes the bloat stage. Someone decides the editor should also manage your Git history, your containers, your database, your terminal, your AI pair-programmer, and on and on. Each feature is reasonable and has value on its own. Taken together, it’s a settings menu with more branches than a soap-opera family tree.
After bloat comes the arms race. PyCharm grows a feature, so VS Code grows two. Extensions sprout extensions. Every release note is a small act of one-upmanship, and the download gets heavier while your screen gets more cluttered and the menus ever more complex.
The end result is a magnificent, sprawling piece of software that does everything except the one thing it should do: help a beginner write code. The newcomer opens it, is greeted by seventeen panels, way too many keyboard shortcuts and a notification begging them to configure their workspace, and quietly wonders if a plain text file might be simpler.
And here’s the bit that really irks me. You end up spending as much time learning and debugging the IDE as you do the code you actually sat down to write. It’s like learning to drive in a Tesla Model 3: what you want is there, buried in that huge console amongst all the other clutter, but driving and thumbing through menus just aren’t compatible.
I’m not saying go back to Notepad++ (though on a bad day, don’t tempt me). But there’s a lesson here about tools that forget who they were built for. The best ones nag you gently and then get out of the way.