Do you like using Intellij or a similar IDE that allows you to navigate your code base easily and restructure freely? Do you like the fact that your code has a huge test suite that allows you to make changes with confidence?

These things seem like good things. Why would anyone have a problem with them?

Recently though at conferences and in discussions at work it is starting to seem to me and other that powerful tools have a dark and dangerous side to them. The more powerful the tools you have at your disposal the longer and longer you can work on a codebase without facing up to the issues that you have.

A powerful IDE allows you to have insanely complex projects with hundreds, possibly thousands, of files in them. I’m not sure that the Java love of abstraction across multiple classes would have happened if you have had to navigate the resulting package structure with Vi.

Rather than working to simplify your code base you can continue to add in each special case and niche requirement, everyone can have a home with a Strategy pattern here and a class hierarchy there. Our test suite grows and grows to make sure that each overlapping requirement can be added safely and without consideration of its worth. We are perhaps proud that 60 to 80% of our codebase is test code that, in itself, is adding no value to our business.

Our rich dependency managers encourage us to add in libraries or even worse extract and share code across multiple projects. Until of course we start to burn in a transitive dependency hell or our own making.

We all love powerful tools, we all love powerful languages that are feature rich but the more powerful our tools our the more they should help us find the simplicity in what we do and ensure that we deliver measurable value quicker rather than providing just a longer noose.