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

For me, Ruby's standard library tends to use names for things I would guess first, and the way people build things in Ruby feels natural to me. Any sort of LSP feature is nice obviously since it's never in the way, but when I end up trying Solargraph or RubyMine I end up noticing I'm just not paying much attention to it. The only places where I end up reaching for it is mass refactoring, like big renames... which are tough in things like Rails projects where files need to be renamed and pluralization matters.

So for me, it's the ergonomics of the language. That's probably mostly related to hours spent with it of course, but I think everyone has some specific environment/language/style that lets them compress the current state of what they're working on in their head better than anything else.

I don't think the way I work is all that different from the way people who use a lot of IDE-like features work. The main difference is that I prefer a pull-based approach to getting information, rather than having my editor push information at me or try to do things for me.

My typical setup for a project is to have my editor (emacs) open with code, and separately to have my project open in a REPL (ghci). For smaller projects I use haskell-mode, which lets me open a REPL with the file I'm working on loaded automatically. At work our codebase is a bit too big and our build system a bit too complicated for haskell-mode to be able to manage my repl, so I use a separate tmux buffer to open ghci.

I can do a lot from my repl. If I want to know the type of something, I can either look it up using the repl if it's a top-level binding, or I can add a type hole and reload the file if it's something that's not directly available in my repl. I can also see what instances are defined for a type, what functions are available in those instances, and where the type is defined.

In addition to my repl, I'll usually have a shell open in my project. If I'm trying to figure out where something is defined, I can just run a command to query hiedb, although in reality it's often fast enough to just use ripgrep.

If I'm trying to remember the name of a file or where it lives, I will typically use fzf, either in my shell or in emacs. I can usually remember enough about the name to at least narrow it down to a couple of options.

For things that live outside of my project, I wrote rofi-hoogle (https://github.com/rebeccaskinner/rofi-hoogle/) to let me search packages and documentation from my desktop with a simple keyboard shortcut. It also lets me jump to the online documentation if I need to read more than the type.

I don't use copiolot or any other sort of AI auto-complete at all. Occasionally I'll present a simplified version of a problem to ChatGPT and ask it to write code, or I'll ask it to review some code, but I typically do that through the web UI. I keep intending to get it set up in emacs but I haven't bothered yet.

I wouldn't necessarily say that other people should adopt my way of working, but it's the best way of working that I've found for me and my own quirks. I've tried IDEs every so often, but I find that the constant distractions make it hard for me to focus on the task at hand- whether it's things popping up in my field of view, auto-complete moving my cursor around, or error messages popping up because I haven't finished the code I'm writing. I'm probably slower at the IDE-specific tasks than people who are really good with IDEs, and maybe even slower at those specific tasks than I would be using an IDE, but the benefit of being able to eliminate distractions and focus on the code I want to write outweighs the cost for me.

How long you have worked in a particular language affects how much you will be looking up function definitions.

Lots of other people working on the same project with loose standards means harder time assembling a mental model of the codebase.

Someone with cursor asked to program in a new language may be like “ah ok whatever sure” vs someone with vim might be like “it’s unreasonable management wants us to use these new age tools X works just fine” and then say “vim is so fast” in the same sitting.

It's a great language but I feel like it requires some tooling