We Still Need Dumb Tools

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From Cambridge, MA

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A lot of the tooling that software engineers use day-to-day has changed dramatically over the past year+. We went from IDEs that had semi-decent autocomplete features and functionality (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript Intellisense features) to basically not working within an IDE at all (who even reads code anymore?!).

However I often find myself wanting for the basic tools we had 5+ years ago to do menial tasks every once and a while.

It'd be great if I could open a basic text editor that had some of the nice features pre-AI (I still want something a bit more than TextEdit, or Vim, etc) to read code or get a sense of the codebase. Similarly I often want to open a basic terminal that has some other basic features but isn't jam packed with AI cruft either.

I wish someone would fork some of these popular tools that started to really bake in AI functionality and just shipped a plain no-AI version of them.

Top of my wishlist would be for:

• VSCode without all the ai/agentic features (include intellisense/autocompolete still, but remove everything else)
• Warp (terminal) without AI features and autocomplete (still with command history or suggested commands/autocomplete for commands)

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