The Unix philosophy applied to development environments (byronsharman.com)

A developer argues for applying the Unix philosophy—small, single-purpose tools composed with pipes—to modern development environments, rather than relying on monolithic IDEs that tightly integrate editing, version control, build, test, debugging and container workflows. The author lists the core developer tasks (write code, build, version control, test, debug, run in containers) and shows how IDEs abstract away the underlying commands (e.g., what runs when you click “run” or resolve a merge), introduce bloat (VS Code/Electron example), and constrain tool choice because plugins must fit an IDE’s API and mental model. Technically, the writer prefers a composable CLI-driven workflow: Neovim for editing, explicit compiler/debugger invocations, git commit on the command line, and scripts to manage containers or builds. This yields clearer, reproducible, and portable pipelines, faster text editing skills, and better understanding of what each step does—tradeoffs being initial learning curve and potential ergonomics loss. For AI/ML practitioners this matters for experiment reproducibility, precise control over containers and training pipelines, and the ability to swap best-of-breed tools. The piece frames the choice as a tradeoff between convenience and deep mastery: integrated UIs speed up tasks, but composable tooling delivers transparency, flexibility, and long-term competence.