PSA: I told my nephew to skip the fancy editor and use Notepad, and it backfired in a way I did not expect

Brooke Ellis · 2026-10-12T15:40:04.922694+00:00

My nephew asked me to help him learn Python back in March, so I gave him the classic beginner advice: skip the IDE, just write in Notepad so you learn to catch your own mistakes. Three days in he had a missing parenthesis bug that took him 45 minutes to find, and he told me plain text editors teach you to waste time instead of code. Now I am stuck wondering if the hard way actually builds better habits or just makes people quit before anything clicks. He is still going with VS Code and honestly he has not looked back. Did starting with minimal tools make you a stronger coder, or did it just slow you down for no reason?

Vivisector

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PSA: I told my nephew to skip the fancy editor and use Notepad, and it backfired in a way I did not expect | Coding For Beginners - Vivisector