The Great Developer Devolution

You're sitting there proud of yourself for using a debugger and waiting a whole 60 seconds for your IDE to boot up, thinking you're doing pretty well. Then you look at the leaderboard and realize you're competing against: • A guy who's literally on Adderall speedrunning problems with pre-written scripts • Someone doing APL puzzles on a System/360 emulator for fun (their HTML 2.0 compliant homepage confirms they're clinically insane) • An Eastern European dev making $200k who types faster than your brain can process thoughts • A Linux kernel hacker golfing in languages that sound like Lovecraftian incantations and measuring performance in clock cycles • A Chinese prodigy who's been institutionalized since age 3 and needs a PhD in discrete math just to understand their solutions • And finally, the most terrifying of all: an IT support guy forced to solve everything in Excel VBA who somehow channels the collective knowledge of every Indian educational YouTuber ever Competitive programming: where your imposter syndrome gets imposter syndrome.

The Vim initiation ritual – desperately smashing Esc, random key combos, and eventually grabbing your mouse in frustration because you have no idea how to exit . The true programmer's hazing ceremony. Eight years as a developer and I still sometimes open Vim by accident and feel that same panic. The only difference now is I know to yell ":q!" while crying slightly less.

The perfect metaphor for the Vim user in every dev team. While everyone else is silently mourning the death of simplicity in text editors, that one developer just has to announce their undying loyalty to Vim. It's like a funeral for normal editing workflows, and the Vim enthusiast still can't resist the urge to tell everyone about their 47 custom keybindings and how they can delete a word with "diw" faster than you can reach for your mouse. The coffin might as well contain the remains of productive team discussions that don't devolve into editor wars.

This is Obsidian's way of saying "Are you really sure you want to enter the Hotel California of text editors?" The Vim confirmation dialog is basically the digital equivalent of those warning signs before roller coasters that say "People with heart conditions should not ride." Obsidian knows once you enter Vim mode, there's a 90% chance you'll be frantically Googling "how to exit vim" in about 30 seconds. That red warning text might as well say "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" because nothing says user-friendly like an editor where the most searched command is how to quit the damn thing. It's the text editor equivalent of a relationship status: "It's complicated."

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute DEVOLUTION of programmers is too real! 😭 On the left, we have the CHAD programmer of yesteryear - building an ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM FROM SCRATCH, talking directly to God, and casually mentioning CIA conspiracies while coding in 640x480 resolution like some kind of digital BARBARIAN! And what do we have now? A pathetic little doge in a coffee sweater, TRAPPED in Vim, desperately clinging to Stack Overflow and Spotify for emotional support! Can't even exit a text editor without begging for help! The audacity! The TRAGEDY! For the uninitiated: TempleOS was an operating system coded entirely by one man (Terry Davis) who claimed divine inspiration. Meanwhile, Vim is that text editor where generations of programmers have been held hostage because nobody remembers how to exit it (it's :q! by the way, YOU'RE WELCOME).

Ah yes, the ancient stone tablet IDE. Because nothing says "I'm a serious developer" like carving your collision detection algorithms into limestone. Modern IDEs with their "syntax highlighting" and "error detection" are clearly for the weak. Real programmers chisel their bugs directly into rock so they're permanent, just like their technical debt.