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

> 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.

I had a similar conversation with a blind classical guitarist before I ever played, which was echoed by my instructor when I started to learn a few years later. Something along the lines of "If you don't know a piece of music to play it with your eyes closed then you haven't practiced it enough for a performance."

I'm not sure I follow the same idea with not utilizing available tooling in software development, but I do believe that most developers would benefit from intentionally going 'back to basics' and limiting their use every so often and shining a light on what you might think you have a solid grasp of but are actually at the limit of your unassisted capabilities.

Before mobile phones where a thing, we used to memorize the phone numbers of every family member and friend and co-worker, etc. The numbers we rarely used, we wrote down or looked up in the phone book. When you got a new number, you maybe wrote it down, then after having dialed it a couple of times, it stuck. This didn't really require any effort, it was just the natural way of doing things.

Then came the mobile phone with the ability to store contacts, today I can't even remember my wife's number.

I have coded for more than 40 years and I hate autocomplete, language servers, etc. I don't use any of it because I have found (after having tried to use it all) that, just like with phone numbers, you don't remember much if you use all of that and you have to make a real effort, but things just don't stick the same way. But if don't use any of that, you only have to look things up in the beginning, then occasionally, then rarely or never again and more things just stick, you get faster in a natural way and you understand your code better. You also think deeper about how to structure your code and how to organize everything.

If you always use a crutch to help you walk, you will never walk by yourself. The crutch will look like it is helping you, but that's only in the beginning, eventually it will hinder you and hold you back.

That's my 2 cents.

"just a tool" is always the excuse for allowing a crutch to make you weak and directionless.

If it's really "just a tool", why so defensive?

Sorry. I know I'm a dick. But come on man, don't pretend the effects of crutches doesn't exist. It's silly to try to deny something so obviously observable all day every day, in all possible contexts not just coding.

SIDE NOTE: An underestimated attribute of using command line editors of olde is that they basically don't change. Yes, Vim is under development still, but the new features don't matter to me, because I don't track them and don't know what they are. All of the things I have ever done with Vim, Vim still does exactly the same way it did when I started using Vim.

I'm too out of touch with the IDE world to be sure they all have this problem, but at least the ones I used BITD would make changes that forced me to re-learn how to do things I already knew how to do before the change. I'm not against doing this entirely, but it needs to be done a lot more judiciously than most higher level tools do it. Code editing simply isn't an area where there are fast advances being made, so if your editor is making large changes, they are probably not advances, they're just causing you problems.

> To think that some people are still writing code like in the 70's.

I'm one of those, sort of. I did install vscode used autocomplete, find definition and on the fly compilation for a while. In the end I turned it all off bar the syntax checking.

Even my i7 32GB laptop it just got in the way, my typing lagging by many seconds while it recompiled and pondered autocomplete. I left syntax checking on only because while it still fell behind in revealing typos, sometimes by minutes, but at least it kept responding to my keystrokes.

I eventually gave up and went back to vim. It's a sad state of affairs when I can find a definition faster with 40 year old tools than a modern IDE can do it. I respect your decision to use modern tools of course, but I'm not sure I'm the luddite here. An Integrated Development Environment that runs slower than I can think is not an improvement in my books.

As for languages and online docs, one of my first steps in learning any new language is to memorise it's standard library. I don't use other libraries unless the bring something very substantial to the table, in such case I memorise them too. Not having to wait for a IDE to suggest autocompletes means the code flows off my fingers, but also means if the IDE starts lagging my typing I get really pissed off.

All that said, I recently tried using IDE + AI + integrated RAG, and was blown away. It's code suggestions are still so bad it's not worth taking the time to evaluate them, but omg as super grep it's amazing. Yes, it might take 15 to 30 seconds to evaluate my "can you find the code that does X" plain English request and provide links to the key functions, but it would take me hours to read through tens of thousands of lines code I haven't seen before to get the same result. Finally, after 40 years, we may have seen the first step change in programmer tooling since the move from line editors.