The “free IDEs” even today aren’t as good as the paid products by Microsoft and JetBrains.

Especially today while the IDEs are free, people are paying for LLM coding assistants.

Tbh, I'm not sure I agree. I program in vim and the terminal. I get way more benefit out of that than VSCode. Regardless, things have improved dramatically. Hell, Linux is way more user friendly than it was even a decade ago.

	▲	scarface_74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		With Vim and the terminal can I set conditional breakpoints, watches, and back in the day when I did bit twiddling in C, debug stack corruption and look at the assembly that the compiler was creating first each line? With JetBrsins ReSharper using Visual Studio, there are hundreds of guaranteed safe project wide refactoring you can do [1] and a lot of various boiler plate code it can autogenerate. Not to mention the dark days of Window GUI development. How exactly is Vim better than a modern IDE? [1] Yes I know all bets are off when you are using reflection.