A look at the working IDE, with Copilot installed and waiting. David Gewirtz / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
Well, I guess it had to happen. I used profanity and pejoratively scolded an AI. I'm not proud. You could say I did it to myself, and that is true. But I did this for you, so please read on. Let's make all this work worth it for both of us.
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In a few minutes, I'll tell you about my journey into and then back out of ChatGPT hell. But first, we need context. This is a story of switching IDEs. For most civilians, this means nothing. But for developers, such an action is momentous and painful.
What is an IDE?
IDE is the acronym for integrated development environment -- the tool and place where pro devs do their devving.
To a professional developer, an IDE is an on-screen cross between an operating room, a well-equipped and carefully laid-out workshop, a perfectly planned and optimized kitchen, and a command center.
Typical IDEs include a place to edit code, a debugger for diagnosing code problems, a terminal for quickly doing wizard-level magical incantations, a database interface for organizing data, a ton of additional tweaks and tools, and, increasingly, one or more AIs.
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The kitchen analogy works a bit here. There are the major appliances -- editor, debugger, and terminal -- roughly analogous to the stove, oven, and fridge. There are secondary smaller tools roughly on the scale of a microwave, blender and air fryer. Then there are all the other tools and resources that are integral to the process. Think of the pots and pans, all the various spatulas, spices, ingredients etc. For a good cook, these all have their places. Certain tools are preferred for one recipe, other tools for another.
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