I understand and sympathize with this point of view.

I would just say this: there is a difference between advice for using a product, and for _optimizing_ your use of a product. Between a user and a power user.

I think devs probably disproportionately like to see themselves as power users of any given tool, and thus with coding agents, there are 1000 "systems" being thrown out on GitHub on any given day. Generally speaking, it is safe to avoid these, especially if you're new to the tool.

But saying the fact that people are into optimizing their setups indicates some fundamental deficiency of the tool misses the point, I think.

Claude Code and Codex CLI (and OpenCode, and I'm sure many others) are _remarkably_ effective right out of the box. The teams behind these tools must make them _generically_ useful so that they are accessible to as many people, and as many use cases, as possible. That is part of why, when you become familiar with the tool, there is typically going to be a level of customization you can apply to it to optimize it for _your_ use cases, beyond the generic out of the box configuration.

Similarly, I don't think it would be fair to critique VS Code simply because most power users augment it with a suite of extensions. In fact, it's customizability/extensibility is part of what makes it great.