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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?

#251

Post by userbinator »

continuational wrote: post #242
userbinator wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have to manually search for files and then Ctrl+F to find functions, lookup docs in a web browser (which I hear is how people who don't use IDEs still do that), or manually run a linter/compiler to see warnings in your code, you're just being really inefficient. It's inefficient the first time but you quickly build a working memory and a deeper mental model of the code, which becomes even more useful in the…

Good riddance? Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you? The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems. I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though. They are occasionally useful when working with popular APIs you use very rarely, or when you need to write some very repetitive code. Other than that, I feel like it's mostly a m…

Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you?

Why spend your life doing _anything_ a computer could do for you? Why even live, if you're going in that philosophical direction?

I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though.

Unfortunately, many of those in management already think it is.

The less people use their brains, the more easily they will be replaced, and the worse the product they'll produce. Unless you want to lose your job and let society drown in mediocre software (which you will no doubt need to use), do not hand over your agency to the machine.

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

#252

Post by aardvark179 »

I use emacs, and although I have LSP configured I switch projects and branches often enough that I don’t rely on it working. Finding definitions is normally pretty easy because code bases have structure, but occasionally can be tricky if the method is inherited, or overridden by subclasses, but that sort of thing sticks in your head after working with a codebase for a little while.

I think co-pilot is the more interesting example you give, because my answer is that I will not use it unless I could do the job without it. For example: yesterday I was refactoring a bytecode interpreter as the core loop had grown so large it was causing a performance issue. Solving this required getting the size of the method containing the inner loop back below a threshold. This isn’t something an IDE’s “Extract method” refactoring can do automatically because there is mutable state that needs to be passed in and out, and if I didn’t already know how I wanted to do it, would not be something I could easily check the correctness of co-pilot doing. So you sit down and think. What stages will you have to go through to extract and change this code? You come up with something that will let you validate the idea and then refine it, and you have tests, lots of tests, and some degree of intuition so that when you see a failure you can guess the thing you might have missed.

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

#253

Post by hnlmorg »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #227
modernerd wrote: post #222

I work with two types of LSP/LLM-averse programmers: 1. The HLSP user This group does use an LSP, it turns out, only via you as the conduit: you are their Human Language Server Protocol. They'll ask, ‘can we pair today?’. From that point, navigating code, looking up method names and signatures, and flagging syntax errors before runtime or compile time is your job. How they find their way around when you're not there…

Very well summarised

Is it though? It reads to me more like elitism to me.

A better summary is: “people have different workflows because different people like to approach problems differently.”

That’s all it is.

I find LSPs largely get in my way. I don’t have them disabled because 1% of the time I do find them useful. But for the other 99% of the time they’re adding no value at all. So I could very easily write code without an LSP (and often do write code in vi with zero additional plugins installed).

What I do really value is code formatters. I like not having to write tidy code and then having code formatters clean it up when I hit save. That’s the kind of enhancement I value. (It also gives me piece of mind that a file has saved successfully when you see alignment pop into place).

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

#254

Post by userbinator »

tasuki wrote: post #249
userbinator wrote: post #221

The sibling comment about a blind programmer is very worth reading, because it is relevant to what I've observed about other (non-blind) programmers who are highly skilled: they do not need tools to tell them what to do, because they have completely internalised the structure of the program and can think about it as a whole. Incidentally, one of the things I often do when solving a problem --- be it finding a bug or…

This works for small projects. I've worked on projects where "hold the entire project in your head" might be somewhere between very hard and impossible. Work the right abstractions, it should be possible to hold the relevant parts in your brain. Still, when you're new to a large project, an ide goes a long way.

Would you consider the Linux kernel a small project?

That's an example of one where a large number of people working on it do not use IDEs.

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

#255

Post by daltonpinto »

xlii wrote: post #127
mckn1ght wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> I work with someone that navigates the tree structure of all our directories every time they need to look for something Counter example: I’m working with LSP dragging codebase where basic code lint takes 45s. My colleague takes a break after each change so that their code navigation starts working again. Inefficient people are inefficient. Not using LSPs isn’t guarantee of efficiency just as using LSP isn’t one. Di…

It is not about speed, is about quality.

When I met the other 2 blind people, one of them joked that yes, they were very organized, but because they had to be, unlike us, being not organized wasn't an option for them.

I don't question the ability you may have to deliver quicker results, but I bet that your incentive to organize stuff is smaller than what your friend has.

Maybe he will be more inclined to refactor that than you and take even more time, and that maybe it pays off. Of course, I have no idea of your deadlines or if you are in a rush for MVP in search of market fit.

But this also follows those lines of: "wanna go fast go alone, wanna go further go together".

I value more quality than speed, but also understand that sometimes speed is what is needed.

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

#257

Post by codr7 »

I feel that's a big issue with learning a language in an IDE.

I've written a ton of C# and I don't remember shit about methods in the standard library, because it's all there, and getting worse with AI. Not to mention the detrimental effect that the constant interruptions must have.

I use IntelliJ for Java, but since I learned the language and standard library long before fancy IDEs were a thing I barely notice the blinkenlights.

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

#258

Post by d3VwsX »

My personal observation, even if this is similar to what others already said: I found that in some (two? three?) big Java-based projects I worked on, where almost everyone used a IDE, the codebase became almost impossible to navigate or modify without using one, so I did. It was so easy to just add a method or class wherever, and it did not matter because you could just ctrl-click a name to find its implementation. It did not matter if you put 100+ methods in the same class or if you named things willy-nilly or overloaded method names.

If I was back working on a project like that, I would use whatever IDE everyone else was using. It makes no sense to fight it. But I prefer projects to not be designed for/by IDE, since that tends to make everything more readable and easy to navigate. I prefer to be able to navigate around the source-code on the command-line or use whatever generic tools to browse, and not be forced to ctrl-click my way around, and if (almost) everyone else working on the code wants that as well it is less likely that someone ruins it.

That said, I have at times also set up Emacs to use LSP or other built-in code-navigation tools, or templates (yasnippets) for generating boilerplate, for some projects. I rarely end up using it much. Usually I just jump around using built-in tools like M-x vc-git-grep or M-x rgrep. The code has to be pretty heavily designed-for-IDE to make those simple tools slow to use.

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

#259

Post by alentred »

In the past I have been training in a coding "bootcamp" for a while. I insisted that people new to coding use a plain text editor, like Notepad on Windows, no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete, nothing, and a command line to lint and compile the code. I only introduced the IDEs much much later, closer to the end of the bootcamp. First, I confirm that it is perfectly possible to complete rather complex projects this way. Secondly, I have no ground truth to compare my results with, but I know that most of the students appreciated the fact that they do not depend on the IDE/LSP/Copilot that much and developed their own understanding of how the things work.

I don't advocate to do the same outside of the learning process, of course. The tools help a lot (in fact, LSPs are awesome), but there are two principles that are important here I think:

- having an understanding of the underlying code, language, etc.

- being intentional about the use of the tools (e.g., invoking auto-complete with a keystroke vs an endless suggestions list; running a linter explicitly vs a code bloated with "insights" and "warning highlights", etc.)

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

#260

Post by memsom »

I think this is very much an age dependent thing for me. When I started programming, there were no LSPs. There was not even any real code completion. I was using the Delphi 1 IDE in my first job and that didn't even really have any type checking till you compiled.

I think Delphi 3 was the first version with basic completion.

I do feel like I have suffered and become a little too dependent on LSPs/AI over time. But it is easy to see why when they can basically write your next line for you with quite a lot of accuracy these days.

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