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

I do not rejoice with code bases where every file has no logic or code in it but there are hundreds of methods and files with everything spread out. I have no idea how those projects fit together because the actual logic is spread out.

For my personal side project hobby work it's all in one file.

Or literally any function from the standard library in C++, which will likely have undefined behaviour if you look at it wrong and didn't read the docs.

- Years ago, I didn't use anything. It was just me, Emacs and a few packages. I surely knew about IDE features, but didn't bother. But I did get frustrated to have to look up things every time when I forget something. Autocompletion is an improvement and seeing docs fly up on a function helps a lot. But it's one part of the picture where the computer aids me...

- case in point: rg or ag are fantastic tools for searching through codebases. I use go-to-definition too if I can. However, I usually can find pointed references to fuzzy ideas about things much faster than co-workers who don't use rg, because regexing a codebase is much simpler than tediously running through files I am not familiar with to get a quick answer.

- autocomplete is useful when I don't know the language and helps to spell correctly. It does take me away from learning a language, but I don't do a lot of coding (hope that changes in 2025!)

- when I write Python, I don't really need tools as much. I pull up docs more. I have pylsp installed and sometimes when it is off or it can't boot for some reason, I just grumble and continue to do things without it. The same with bash. I am good with python but stink with bash, but still don't use LSP at all with bash.

- I still have some odd fears that since I don't use dedicated IDEs for most things, I will get disrespected when it is relevant for career progression. This is not without merit - sometimes computer-assisted tools can help with certain tasks much faster than others. We shouldn't measure based on individual tasks, but if you are getting constantly stuck on trying to finish something but the bottleneck is your chosen text editor/environment to convey ideas, it can look negatively.

- please, no copilot! I already feel like I lean on search engines too much to answer my questions. I know I become better when I enrich myself with general knowledge on a topic. It doesn't answer everything (thankfully search engines are there for that and don't want the quality of sites fall by the wayside because of copilot), but I imagine I would not be so swift on the types of problems I solve if it weren't for deliberate documentation reads and discovery.

- I am improving my understanding of Lisps (common and emacs). I feel like there is a different experience working in these. The typical IDE tools feel different given that all these tools can be used to interact with a running environment instead of using something that just primarily analyzes source code. I would probably fall back to my old habits when I am comfortable, but it is fascinating at least to me how the tools fit together differently than in "normal" languages.