The biggest misconception about building developer tools is that developers want more features

I've been building for developers for four years, and the pattern I keep seeing in my own product and in every dev tool I've watched succeed or die is this: developers don't switch tools because the new one has more. They switch because the old one wasted their time in a specific, annoying way, and the new one removed that specific annoyance.

"More features" is what vendors think developers want. "Less friction in the exact place I'm already annoyed" is what actually drives adoption.

The corollary: every feature you add is a new thing a developer has to evaluate before trusting you. The best dev tools I use are the ones that resisted adding things.

So my claim is: in developer tools, feature count is a cost, not a benefit. Curious whether people agree or think I'm overstating it. And if you build dev tools. what's the one feature you deliberately refused to build, and did it help or hurt?