My setup for writing code
Why I stopped using IDEs, Vscode and went back to nvim + tmux
TLDR: More code -> Search on IDE's are much slower -> back to ripgrep, nvim
Over the past couple of months, I've slowly stopped using IDEs. Even editors built for AI like Cursor I have stopped using myself. You would think that with all the custom AI integrations with these IDEs that productivity would be faster but the reality is a different story.
With LLMs, writing more code has been easier than ever before.
- The tax on writing code is low
- refactors cost less time
- Features can be written in parallel!
However, a trend I see now is that developers are more likely to duplicate code. Before, I feel like I would try my best to make something reusable and use shared packages as much as I can. Now, simple utils are copied over and over. Also, with the popularity of monorepos this just amplifies the amount of code in a repository.
What does this have to do with IDEs?
Quality of software products deteriorating
In my experience, not just IDEs but existing software is just generally worsening in quality. People care about getting features out rather than optimizing the quality/latency of these products. This is not truly all because of AI though. I think features just get prioritized more than quality control, and in the land of AI, feature development just gets fast and faster without taking the time to understand repercussions.
Search functionality is slower
With more code being written and monorepos being popular, it takes so long to do a Ctrl+F in my IDE or editor that it becomes the bottleneck in my productivity. With AI as well, I usually have multiple instances of the editor for different repositories, but this takes up so much RAM!
So what do I use?
Back to nvim and tmux! Back in college, I tried to be a terminal warrior. It was hard though because remembering configs, shortcuts, and writing code was hard. Now, with AI, writing plugins are much easier. Diagnosing environment issues take no time. I can have a full nvim + tmux setup with code linting, autocompletion, etc. All while having much less RAM usage than two instances of IntelliJ or Vscode.
With multiple sessions of tmux as well, navigating multi agent sessions are much easier. Usually now, I inspect code with telescope/ripgrep and have another tmux pane with an AI agent. This is much faster for productivity and I can have 4-5 of these running at a time.