This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive. Primitive IDEs and text editors may help your geek cred score, but as a long term java dev who's moved into Kotlin and go recently, vs code was borderline terrible and very limited in what I wanted in features. I never used intellij until my most recent company (eclipse mostly beforehand) but they really do a good job at streamlining the dev flow. I do miss eclipses much more dynamic layouts and arguably better integration with some external technologies, but idea's Kotlin integration has been top notch and makes for quite brisk in-the-flow coding experience like no other.

As for hitching and speed, intellij has a poor 15 seconds on my laptop before it's super snappy and basically never drops perf whatever I'm hammering at. I think the common feature rich IDE slowness strawman is a defence for what's better expressed as an opinion. If you like featureless ides, have at it.

> This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive.

Correct: and in my case, VS Code with my customizations (plugins + configs) is more than equal to the task, it does everything I'd want from a full-blown IDE, and does it in a snap. Being disrupted by your IDE is maddening because it only happens when you're in deep focus.

My IDE journey was similar to yours Eclipse -> Jetbrains, then what started off as a casual affair with VS Code on personal projects ended up being serious indeed.

I felt like it was easier to add features I want to VS Code than to remove/disable fearures from IntelliJ to trim the fat, YMMV. I'm glad to hear IntelliJ s now consistently fast after initialization - when I last used it, the slow downs were unpredictable and lasted minutes, and occasionally required restarting the IDE, but that was a long time ago, back when SSD storage was expensive.

Vscode is all dandy and fine until you try to debug something and inspect an object in memory only to find out that msft programmers hard coded the object representation as a string [Object object] cause they couldn’t be bothered to properly implement the debugger.

I find IntelliJ to be quite fast. How big is your project?

This was many years ago, but IIRC, it was about 7-10kLoC at the time. Would you say IntelliJ is as fast as VS Code?

It's a subtle question. I'd say IntelliJ is less responsive, but I wouldn't say it's any slower. When stressed, IntelliJ's UI will get choppy and usually show a progress bar at the bottom. VSCode tends to keeps running at 60fps and stick a plain "Loading..." string somewhere in the UI.