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

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

#111

Post by cookiengineer »

mithametacs wrote: post #97

I had no choice most of my career doing Rails. Now I do C++ and I would fight to the death to keep autocomplete. But Copilot I bought a license for a got a refund for after a few months. In the net, it wastes your time. And I mean, copilot in particular is especially bad. It refuses lots of valid programming questions. Other LLMs are better. But they still are wrong a lot.

Did you also try out selfhosted LLM alternatives? How do they perform?

I am looking for a terminal/offline LLM I can use for templating tasks, as most other programming mistakes are caught by my linters and tests anyways.

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

#112

Post by tmountain »

thwarted wrote: post #80

The shell is my development environment. I open up new terminals and shells willy nilly. I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used. I think being surrounded by the code and being able to slice and dice it leads to a certain kind of familiarity that a tool that takes you right there…

I did it this way for about 20 years and recently moved to VSCode with its integrated terminal. It makes me feel pretty lazy and like I’m “cheating”, but there are some productivity benefits (LSP), and I’m less of a purist than I used to be. I maintained a blog about vim for 3-4 years, so I was pretty committed to that workflow back in the day.

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

#113

Post by magnetowasright »

magnetowasright wrote: post #51

Autocomplete in code is the single most annoying thing I've ever experienced. While I do have a fantastic memory, I don't feel like it makes a huge difference? I don't quite understand the workflow using autocomplete, I suppose. If I'm typing something I know what I'm trying to achieve (with or without a more concrete implementation plan), the general context of the code I'm working with, and it is quicker and far mo…

I forgot to mention that I also have linting issues and other gutter icon things completely turned off as well. I have a code formatter installed ...I think? Those are things that I could probably turn on without wanting to pull my hair out but again I've not felt the need. Typing my imports manually is mildly annoying in a small handful of areas but not enough to make me do something smarter about it lol

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

#114

Post by bitwize »

gosub100 wrote: post #81
dpcan wrote: post #42

I’ve been doing this a looooooong time. And that’s really about it. Every time a popup or tooltip covers code around my cursor I groan in agony. I’d probably use it if the tool tips just updated in the bottom right of my screen while I typed or something.

There was some shitty IDE years ago that would stop your keyboard input because it clogged the CPU with lookups for auto complete. It might have been eclipse or some other java monstrosity.

Visual Basic and VBA used to throw up syntax error dialogs if you cursored off an incomplete line.

It's why I don't like pair programming: done properly per XP principles, it's like having a human version of VB's intrusive error dialog.

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

#116

Post by notpushkin »

dpcan wrote: post #42

I’ve been doing this a looooooong time. And that’s really about it. Every time a popup or tooltip covers code around my cursor I groan in agony. I’d probably use it if the tool tips just updated in the bottom right of my screen while I typed or something.

There is an extension for Codium / VS Code that shows function docs on the margin instead of a popup – I find it neat and less distractive.

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

#117

Post by mixmastamyk »

Editors have had go-to-definition a decade or two before lsp.

I usually use Python in medium-size projects and remember the types for a couple of files at least. It’s almost always one of the top five builtins or a custom class I wrote or modified. If in doubt I click on the word and it highlights everywhere. Usually obvious what it is by context.

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

#118

Post by mithametacs »

cookiengineer wrote: post #111
mithametacs wrote: post #97

I had no choice most of my career doing Rails. Now I do C++ and I would fight to the death to keep autocomplete. But Copilot I bought a license for a got a refund for after a few months. In the net, it wastes your time. And I mean, copilot in particular is especially bad. It refuses lots of valid programming questions. Other LLMs are better. But they still are wrong a lot.

Did you also try out selfhosted LLM alternatives? How do they perform? I am looking for a terminal/offline LLM I can use for templating tasks, as most other programming mistakes are caught by my linters and tests anyways.

I’m satisfied bouncing between the free tiers of Claude and ChatGPT

I usually only have like a few hard questions per day, where I have lots of unknown unknowns.

If the LLM doesn’t get me an answer within the free tier number of messages, it’s not gonna get there

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

#119

Post by Fizzadar »

Long time sublime user, always has autocomplete off as it’s more a distraction than use. Recently started using LSPs for the inline error/warning checking but avoid things like go to definition - search works just as well in my experience and is faster.

See lots of comments here about code organisation and developing a deeper understanding of a codebase and I could not agree more. At least for myself not having all these functions gives me a deeper understanding of the code. I’m probably slower to onboard onto a codebase but I bet long term have higher productivity on it.

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

#120

Post by mckn1ght »

daltonpinto wrote: post #99

This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. I asked him how he managed to code, and he replied with something that stayed with me: a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place. The organization should be so intuitive that anyone could build a mental model of the structure and navigate it easily, even without seeing it. It felt…

Of course I agree that code should be organized logically, but I wonder if you could expand on what you mean. Do you drill down into finer and finer directories of detail, code units, classes and functions?

I work with someone that navigates the tree structure of all our directories every time they need to look for something. It is painfully slow to watch and if you ask me, they produce fairly spaghetti architecture. Some of that could be a lack of familiarity with the idioms of our platform and its available SDKs.

But I ⌘ click all the time as well as quick-open right to the class, variable or function I need to work with, and I feel like I still organize things better. I’m constantly fixing the weirdness and proposing even more things that should be improved.

You might even get a bit of a Conway’s Law effect by committing unnecessarily to a specific, onerous work style.

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