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

>If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month.

In the past when I've tried to use IDEs, I've often given up within minutes because they would keep doing things that disrupt my flow - like popping up an entire menu of autocomplete suggestions in a way that obscures other code I'm trying to read, or autotyping a close bracket that I would have typed anyway by muscle memory, or not making it clear how to move the cursor past something it auto-typed, or interrupting me with warnings that something won't compile when I haven't finished typing it....

> autocomplete

is rarely useful to me, I just type things out.

I'm just quicker this way. By that I mean that my stream of thought just flows, when thinking about autocompletion is like in another "brain space" which makes my mind stutter.

I don't know if I'm wall-clock quicker for real, especially as I'm not that fast a typer (certainly not as fast as I want to be) but the mental exercise is annoying enough that I prefer the smooth tarmac of typing it all vs the pebbled trail of jumping back and forth between thinking about the output of typing and autocompleting.

If some autocomplete produces a dropdown list the thing it does help me is a quick feedback as to whether I made a typo, but I basically never tab the autocompletion out.

Only time I do tab out autocompletions is on the shell, and mostly only for paths.

> language servers

I do kind of see the appeal e.g VScode's invoking this inline view of a method implementation right at the call site. In practice I never use it.

Another one is inlay hints in Vim, e.g with type information for dynamic languages (e.g Ruby when using RBS) or to correctly feed autocompletion.

What I don't like is how heavyweight LSPs "feel".

> and recently copilot

I tried Copilot a few times and it was a) slow and b) mediocre.

Slow is stupendously because it feels like I'm driving an autobahn, except littered with 10kph roadbumps.

Mediocre as it sometimes produces code that works, but most of the time is either wrong or flat out doesn't work; even for boilerplate its output is bad/inconsistent with the codebase/outright incorrect. So every time I have to enter a "review mode" state of mind and fix the damn thing, which ends up being slower than just fully typing the thing out in the first place.

> go-to-definition

:sp p lib/whatevs (backed by fzf) then /thething because codebases I work on are typically organised sensibly.

Or I just open a new tab and rg thething then vim thepath +:42

Unix as IDE is stupidly fast and powerfully flexible for me.

> Do you just remember every type and field in a codebase

Mostly, not everything but I do have a mental map to find things quickly with the above.

Rereading the above, I realise that maybe the takeaway is that I'm a "fixes radios by thinking" type of person, which means huge mental models and map of everything fit in my mind, then I reason it out and come up with a solution in my mind, and I just need to type it out as a final step in a sort of stream of thought way, so anything that gets between the mind and the characters appearing on screen is a major drag.

I don't think it is any worse or better than an IDE, it's just the way I work, and I've seen some people do crazy stuff crazy fast with IDEs/LSPs/LLMs just as well. It's just not my way of operation.

If they are good at what they do, I think they are simply good at keeping things in mind, what everything is called, developing a good mental model.

Personally I often write code without LSP, and use pure text completions with Emacs (words of opened buffers) and cycle through them. I know the language well enough, or I look things up in their documentation until I know them well enough. Occassionally I will also use LSP, if it exists and is easily configured and works well.

Go to definition: If I don't have it, I develop a map of the project in my mind where I find what in a project. I have also observed how projects become not so well organized, when people rely too much on always being able to "navigate through code". One does not need to pay much attention to module naming or class names and the like, if one never na igates the file tree to go to the file. Sometimes I have to rgrep/ripgrep.

So, your argument is that AI does not replace programmers, it just... replaces programmers?

I'm a Rails programmer and recently the Ruby language plugin for VSCode I was using was deprecated so I switched to Shopify's ruby-lsp. On the one hand, it's much much more capable than the old plugin: better syntax highlighting, actually useful inline definitions, style hints, etc. On the other hand, it's also way more annoying: there's a bug that sometimes breaks my projects' dependencies so I have to reinstall them, the code completion actually slows me down more than it helps, and if the LSP can't start for some reason (which happens quite often) I get a stack of error popups in the corner of my screen.

On the whole I think I prefer my old setup. All I really need out of my IDE is decent syntax highlighting. I've got devdocs.io for Ruby and most Rails definitions and I know how to spelunk through the Rails codebase for anything that misses. Go-to-definition is handy for my own code but I generally know where it lives, and if I've forgotten there's always ctrl-shift-f or `method(:blah).source_location`.