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VS Code/PlatformIO actually makes that easier than the Arduino IDE. And, as a bonus, the specific version of a library that you use is tied to a single project and won't affect any others. Which is really important when you use a library that is dependent on a particular version of another library.

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this is what made me rage quit on Arduino IDE about 1 hour after starting any embedded dev (esp32) for the first time. I've got no clue what im doing with embedded stuff, but I am a SWE, and I expect to be able to test sweeping changes and have them be isolated in branches/git-stash/etc...

Having to remembering everything I played with tweaking in a UI is a hilarious no-go.

Arduino IDE shines when you're building something small and simple, where the code is at most two pages long. That satisfies a majority of the original use cases for arduino. e.g., my first use of it at work was to toggle a relay on and off once per minute to catch a problem with a new design that only happened at power-on. That was probably under 10 LoC.

However, in the intervening 15-20 years, people have been using arduino for increasingly complex applications and the basic IDE really sucks for that.

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