Tooling Theatre refers to the practice of hiding bad code behind good tooling in software development.
While tools like Prettier, ESLint, and CI/CD pipelines can make codebases look clean and functional, they might be masking underlying issues.
The article points out that tooling is meant to assist developers by catching errors and improving code quality, but it should not replace human judgment in writing good code.
In essence, relying solely on tools without addressing the core problems in software development can give a false sense of security and competence.