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I agree that both approaches are equally fast, and I myself did use VS Code at work a lot before the agents became widespread, so I can imagine myself doing either options. The terminal version is still less keystrokes because of the tab completion or reverse-i-search, but that's nitpicking.

> people's workflows are really personal so I'd never tell someone to switch their's

I regularly, especially when working with younger colleagues at work, find myself struggling to look at how slow they are in the terminal, like when they hit the up arrow 20 times to find the specific command in the history. If I have a close enough relationship with a person to make sure my advice won't be considered rude, I'd probably say “Ctrl+R and then type”, or even “let me show you how I would do it faster”, but doing this too often is borderline rude, so sometimes I just watch and feel bad for them.

by overgard1 hours ago|

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I've seen it with seniors too. The smartest person I worked with (by far!) used to constantly use the menus in Visual Studio (OG Visual Studio, not code) for basically every operation. It was incredibly painful to watch. Watching him debug was a nightmare.

The second smartest guy I worked with couldn't really type properly. (He'd use two fingers). He was still a fantastic coder.

The thing is though, it kind of didn't matter because the value these guys provided was with their incredibly high intelligence, and the friction with how they interacted with tools was more of an issue on the margins than a big deal.

I think for people solving easier problems than these guys (who were working on legitimately hard problems), like, a webdev fixing frontend code, tools might matter a lot because there's less thinking and more navigating and typing. So context matters here a lot. But I definitely don't think you get to be an amazing programmer by CLI mastery (it definitely helps, but it's not a requirement)