Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

It wasn't, and if it did I would wager it would write it more elegantly and coherently than me. That goes to show how much I use Claude/Copilot/ChatGPT at my job.

I primarily use a pretty minimal vim setup, and I use it a lot differently than most devs these days use their editors. I don't really have a "home" machine for programming, I just ssh into whatever box the code is going to be running on and use that machine's vim. I rsync over my vim config/plugins if I'm going to write more than a few hundred lines from that box, or if I'm using a language that doesn't have good native syntax highlighting and needs a plugin. For work at least I use local vim on my work-provided laptop, but other than that I don't really have a tight association to any particular dev environment. If it runs vim I'm happy, so I can pick up and start writing code comfortably from anywhere.

> how do you do it? Do you just remember every type and field in a codebase? What does your flow look like?

It's very different for a codebase I'm familiar with vs one I'm still learning. I do the vast majority of my programming on the former, where I don't feel most of the features you mentioned really matter. Yeah, I remember the types and fields. Usually they're already being used several times in the same file I'm already working in, so it's rare that I even have to make an attempt to recall something, and even rarer that I fail to. When I need to change or add something, I simply open the relevant files and write the relevant code, because I know where it should go.

When I'm learning a codebase, there's a lot of jumping around and looking things up to get familiar with it. I've found that using IDE features during this stage makes me slightly more productive in the short term, but makes me much slower at becoming familiar with the codebase in its entirety (or the subsystems relevant to what I'm working on, in very large codebases). Being familiar with the codebase in its entirety is very important to me and I feel like it enables me to design features and bug fixes much more reliably. My number one priority when working on a new long term codebase is to get to the point where I can fit basically the whole codebase in my head (with a fidelity depending mostly on the size of the codebase), and I do that much better when I'm working on it raw and not outsourcing my understanding to tools. Then once I have that complete understanding, I no longer need the tools anyway.

> What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?

I open the file it's in and read the code. If I don't know where it is (which is rare, especially because most languages and codebases have rules or conventions for file/module/function names), then I grep the codebase for its definition before opening the file. But usually if I'm in the Foo subsystem and need to check the definition for its Bar.baz function, I know it'll be in src/foo/bar.ext and I can "/def baz" or whatever to jump to the definition as soon as I open the file. I've been meaning to try getting used to fzf vim plugins for the last 5 years or so but I really just don't care enough to put in the effort. It's obviously slower to grep and open and search for the def, but the problem just doesn't come up often enough for there to be a good incentive for me.

Have you tried the Clive or Continue extensions? AFAIK Continue is somewhat like Cursor. I prefer Clive though, it's become an important part of my workflow - although perhaps even more important is knowing when not to teach for it.