Honestly this is why I use emacs. Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.

My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse).

That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context.

Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.

It doesn't usually take a too much code - usually around 20,000 lines - where I personally am not able to think my way through debugging complex failures. Tombstoning code only gets you so far (and is a useful skill). Being able to step through code and jump around symbol references is a huge help for my limited powers.

If you have fully memorized all of Linux and GLibC and all your supporting libraries then yeah, I guess you don't need powerful tools.

Emacs steps through code and jumps around symbol references, though.

> Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems.

Since I dont need updates every 5 minutes, I disable the update checker if on Windows, and just don't update my software stack all of the time as it inconveniences me.

You have the option to not update in place. Download the new version and keep the old one too, then test the new version, if they broke your workflow go back to the old version until the bugs are fixed.

I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to fight for a day to get rid of".

Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.

I don't agree with your assessment, but I want to encourage you to raise bug tickets on YouTrack (their answer to Jira). In the last 10 years, I have had more than 100 (no joke!) of my bug tickets fixed by JetBrains. If you write a good description with a min-repro, they will fix it.

    > I wish it was a more stable product

Can you give a specific example of a bug that you encountered?

I have tried that and all issues were already reported. It still took them a few months to resolve it. See examples of last year serious bugs:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-72046 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-79448 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-78077

I can't get how poetry support problems were introduced. They have made new patch release just before Christmas holidays which introduced major problem (IDE periodically updates package lock file). It took them 3 months to fix it. After a few weeks they reintroduced the bug and said that it is feature and added registry option to revert to old functionality. I still do not understand what is the reason for updating package lock file.

Not the parent, but I have to agree with them. I'm a steadfast IntelliJ user, but every release seems to break something different.

I almost always file a report, many of which remain unresolved. In several cases I've reported bugs that are promptly marked as a duplicate of a years-old bug. For example:

* The Go plugin appears to make the IDE is very slow (>10 seconds) at detecting files changed outside the app. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/GO-18510/IDE-is-very-sl... (1 month old now)

* The file modification icon gets stuck (saving doesn't clear it), possibly because of some Git state tracking. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/GO-18094/File-modificat... (3 years)

* The "next/previous error" navigation shows the line error but then immediately hides it again. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-156089/Next-Highli... (11 months old)

All three relate to what I would call core functionality, rather some rare, niche language feature. They all disproportionately affect my daily use. How can a serious company let bugs like these hang around, not for one week, or two weeks, or a month, but three years?

My guess from the amount of churn in YouTrack is they're churning out too many features creating more bugs at a higher rate than they can fix them, and are simply overwhelmed, and their triage process must be deprioritizing a lot of basic stuff.

My most recent bug: After upgrading to 2025.1, the IDE freezes completely 1-2 times a day, requiring a force quit. I reported the bug 10 days ago, collecting all the output they ask for in such cases, and all I've gotten are crickets. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-371932/IDE-freezes...