[weitendorf]

There are multiple developer subcultures (nominally for productivity but mostly hobbyists) pretty much exclusively motivated by installing and configuring complex, visually-dense, high-learning-curve tooling and editor setups driven by the same psychology.

Besides the cultural association between keyboard navigation and complex tools with being a 1337 h4xx0r, I think there is something to be said about the process of tinkering with and learning how one's own tools work, or more generally experimenting with new, "interesting" ways of working than the default choice (which around where AI was at the time of this study), and being more engaged and thus more knowledgable about one's own work or problem domain, even if the overhead ends up being a poor investment time-wise upfront. Personally, if it took me 20% longer to accomplish something but I understood it 95%, vs 75% if I had done it the "fast way", I would almost always take the 20% latency hit, with the expectation that more knowledge/exposure to different tools and techniques would have much better ROI over time than marginally faster delivery.

There's a certain kind of developer (much moreso the kind all-in on AI in early 2025) who thinks that AI is really smart and knowledgeable and assigns a high degree of confidence/deference to its responses, the same way you might to a venerated subject matter expert or wikipedia/stackoverflow/google search result. To this person involving the AI lends more credibility/confidence in their work and their own understanding of it (vs if they just uncritically copied code off stackoverflow). Better understanding this kind of user made me realize that the quality signals and mental models people build around productivity can vary immensely even within the same profession or team. Productivity-hacking is a lot more about vibes and identity-construction/tribal affiliations than most people would like to admit.