And the easy, boring, legally unproblematic stuff can already be handled by good IDE completion features. As a bonus those are actually tested and deterministic.
To be fair, a good IDE can give you low-effort tools to one-click typical use-cases.
Other than that I completely agree. Devs get hang-up on trivial syntax topics waaaay too often, when the actual time-killer lies in reasoning and performing test-cycles.
That's probably what everyone said when auto-complete was invented and IDEs were used. The actual code written in most cases isn't so important, the architecture, experience in building systems and debugging skills across a whole stack are what counts.
I perfectly agree with you that using a quality IDE allows you to achieve all of those things and I don't argue that features such as autocomplete (and I believe you touched on macros) can be extremely useful.
But I still pose the question, why is it worth the time to learn what is considered a complicated IDE (if it needs to be taught)? Would the time not be spent better, say, being genuinely productive, rather than merely preparing for future productivity?
We live in the here and now, my boss wants to hear that my project will be done on time, not that it will be a week late because I need to learn the more fickle aspects of an IDE he didn't sanction before I can finish it.
When you start to work with too many languages frequently, using syntax from one while writing another is common and IDEs really help at this point. I too prefer not to remember APIs and methods, but with time, our brain starts maintaining a cache of these. Completions make this faster.
That and error detection are only features I like in IDEs. For everything else, dedicated tools are often better (but not necessarily easier) than integrated ones.
In all seriousness though, I do agree with this with the exception that the IDE needs to make room for the application you're writing. If it can use an extra core to provide smarter autocompletion or discover potential bugs, I'm all for it.
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