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Yes, for things like Node, I do use tools like the chrome dev tools for debugging and such.

But find a terminal first approach leads me to other tools like curl and jq usage as I go. I see coworkers using a ton of time trying to repetitively execute the code to see those spots in really inefficient ways. And end up completely lost when they could be using tools like git bisect.

Or another good example devops type support is if one web server out of many seems to be misbehaving, I can use aws command line to get internal ips behind the lb to curl to grep and find it in minutes after others have tried for hours. It makes it second nature if your mind goes there first.

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I work 99% in a terminal and fire up a JetBrains IDE when I need to do deep debugging. It’s so rare for me though that it’s worth more for me to get good at the terminal stuff. I’m sure this depends heavily on the type of work being done, game dev for example really needs a good debugger. That being said, gdb and others have perfectly fine text mode interfaces, albeit with a steeper learning curve.

As always, the “best” tool is the one your most familiar with that gets the job done. Text vs GUI doesn’t really matter at the middle of the bell curve.

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