My workplace recently started pushing developers to switch from their usual development tools to Cursor IDE. Most of our team has been comfortable with IntelliJ and other JetBrains products for years. What caught me off guard was how much trouble even senior developers are having with this transition. They’re struggling with basic tasks like configuring settings and understanding what actually happens behind the scenes when they hit build or run buttons. It made me wonder if this is normal everywhere else. How many people on your teams can actually compile and execute their projects from command line without relying on their IDE? Should companies worry about this kind of tooling dependency or is it just part of modern development? I’m genuinely curious about other people’s experiences with this.
We did the same thing - forced everyone onto Eclipse after half the team was using random editors. The productivity hit was bad, but what really caught me off guard was how it exposed knowledge gaps nobody knew existed. Devs who seemed solid suddenly couldn’t figure out why builds were failing because they’d never actually looked at the Maven config. The whole transition turned into an accidental boot camp. Some people got stronger because they had to learn the toolchain properly. Others never got their speed back. It came down to attitude - did you see it as a chance to learn or just an annoying roadblock? Your management should’ve checked how comfortable everyone was with command line tools first.
Yeah, switching environments always kills productivity short-term, but there’s usually a deeper problem.
We switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ last year across three teams. The IDE change wasn’t what destroyed us - it was realizing how many devs had no clue how their build pipeline actually worked. They’d just hit run and pray.
The people who recovered fastest weren’t the senior devs. They were the ones who understood what happens when code compiles. They knew their build files, dependency management, and could fix things when they broke.
Command line skills are like insurance - useless until you desperately need them. When your IDE craps out, you’re either still productive or you’re waiting for IT to save you.
Honest take? Management probably picked Cursor for decent reasons, but they should’ve done a skills audit first. Companies that ignore tooling dependency end up with fragile teams. You’ll hurt for 2-3 months, then probably be fine.
Use this as a wake-up call though. Make sure your people can build and deploy without clicking buttons.
Been there. Management forced us to switch to VS Code after years of using our own editors. Productivity tanked for 6-8 weeks, hit our senior devs the hardest since they’d built up all that muscle memory. Leadership always underestimates the transition cost. They see the upside but ignore the delivery slowdown while everyone’s adjusting. Your command line point’s spot on though. Devs who know the build processes adapt way faster because they don’t panic when the GUI breaks. The ones who lean heavy on IDE automation? They struggle hard. Real question is whether Cursor’s worth the disruption - and you won’t know that for months.
totally agree! i think changing tools without a solid reason just messes up workflow. Cursor may be nice, but if the team is used to something, it’s a pain to switch. most devs can use command line, but it’s about efficiency, right? stick with what works!