The Brick Wall

At Geek Squad, new cadets shadowed agents before we're allowed to fly solo. I got paired with Jayson.

The job is simple: drill a few holes, mount the TV, give a demo, try to sell something, and leave. For this job, we landed on a mid-century brick house. When Jayson went to drill the first hole, the bit just spun against the wall. Loud, dusty, going nowhere.

His solution? Have me push from the other side. Two grown men, back-to-back like we're charging a Kamehameha, throwing our weight into the drill as it slowly, painfully chewed through brick.

The drill wasn't broken, and Jayson wasn't making a mistake. He just brought the wrong tool for the job.

VS Code is like Jayson's affordable DeWalt. It's popular, easy to use, and people love it. I used it when I started learning programming. But watch someone else use it for a while, and you'll notice the friction: reaching for the mouse, highlighting text by dragging, holding down arrow keys, selecting characters one at a time like they're defusing a bomb.

What we really needed for that brick wall was a hammer drill. In the world of text editors, that's Vim.

I was peer-pressured into Vim by watching a vibe coder named ThePrimeagen. I'll admit, at first, it just looked cool, but after actually using it, I realized it wasn't just flashy. It was a fundamentally different way of working.

You stop thinking in "go here, click this, delete that." You start thinking in paragraphs, quotes, words, and the space around them. You move with motions, jumps, and references. You realize that drilling is just a single variable in your job function, so why choose the slowest tool?

I'm not saying VS Code is bad or that you're a bad developer for using it. Use whatever works best for you.

But if you've ever felt like your editor is slowing you down, or thought, "there has to be a faster way," maybe you're just using the wrong tool for the job.

Maybe it's time to try something new.