Neither do you need and IDE, syntax highlighting or third party libraries, yet you use all of them.
There's nothing wrong for a software engineer about using LLMs as an additional tool in his toolbox. The problem arises when people stops doing software engineering because they believe the LLM is doing the engineering for them.
Every IDE I've used just worked out of the box, be it Visual Studio, Eclipse, or anything using the language server protocol.
Having the ability to have things like method auto-completion, go-to-definition and symbol renaming is a net productivity gain from the minute you start using it and I couldn't imagine this being a controversial take in 2025…
> I don't know what “tarpit” you're talking about.
Really? You don't know software developers that would rather futz around with editor configs and tooling and libraries and etc, etc, all day every day instead of actually shipping the boring code?
There's nothing wrong for a software engineer about using LLMs as an additional tool in his toolbox. The problem arises when people stops doing software engineering because they believe the LLM is doing the engineering for them.