This idea of being good enough, embracing mediocre capabilities for life & only focusing on shirt term output forever is exactly the local minima this post is warning against. Selling yourself a compromised future, being a passive consumer of technology, is anathema to the greater objectives of life & computing, in my view.

Selling yourself on comprimise, swearing you have served yourself, also seems hollow when one is deliberately snubbing trying to raise themselves to a perch where they are capable of evaluating. The anti-elite pitch is easy because it doesnt even have to get good enough to assess the merits & values of the school of lifelong learning & struggles. As for your precious output, it might be totally different & better if you had opted to invest in yourself & see technology as less than a lever you know how to crank.

> So, you've learned CodeMod scripts . How much timeyou will then have to spend to replicate 5% of IntelliJ's refactoring capabilities?

I was assuming you'd get >50% of the IntelliJ's refactoring you might potentially use in those two afternoons.

And you can invent new ones whenever you feel like in a couple hours.

Your attitude is balls dude, personal & not informational. Chill out, step off, desist from being personally insulting in your rplies. You have no idea how easy it is to replace this precious valued thing you so adore. That's not a problem. But you're getting wrapped up about it & becoming uncivil. You simply don't know. Stop getting worse.

It's easy to just assume your tool works for you & it's the right pick, but precious few developers a) actually know computing well enough to assess the field of options, b) have any idea what they're buying.

It's heavyhanded bias that you've disregarded other options, and called whatever you think of as "best" and left everything else as "works ok all the time."

I see the small suite of built-ins as the "works ok", and not even "all of the time," just, for a couple small specific use cases. Learning about metaprogramming, ASTs, code-rewriting is a lifelong opportunity to get better, to understand what we really do when we write code at whole new levels, and those tools we truly, that truly fit the problems we actually have are the best tools.