Today's tools contain yesterday's hard work
At one of my first software jobs in the mid-2000s, I had a coworker who was a wizard with grep, sed, awk, regular expressions, xargs, and tail. He'd pipe them together like some sort of wild spell to solve a problem. I never knew what he was doing.
Meanwhile, I was writing hundred-line Java programs to do the same things.
I sometimes think about how his hard work, and the work of people like him who shared what they knew on StackOverflow, is one of the reasons we can just do things now.
Originally posted on X. Lightly edited for reading here.