In my experience an IDE becomes a crutch for beginners to programming (and I reserve my right to change my opinion).<p>IDEs helps new engineers by postponing having to learn high productivity command line tools like Bash and Git.<p>I see this all the time with new engineers (read: bootcamp graduates) and it is expensive having to educate new employees about the context in which their IDE operates (whether that&#x27;s locally, test, staging or production).<p>The IDE&#x27;s value-add also becomes more questionable when developing on more than one part of the stack (e.g. client + server-side code).<p>There are also costs to vendor lock-in--no one should have to use <i>your</i> IDE to be able to contribute to your software. The IDE licensing business is a racket as evidenced by the JetBrains incident:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10170089" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10170089</a><p>I think it&#x27;s a good exercise to remind yourself: &quot;what do I need beyond syntax-highlighting?&quot; IMO, most IDE features are low value-add and do not increase productivity.