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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?

#501

Post by apelapan »

chthonicdaemon wrote: post #163
brookst wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but isn’t this just “why don’t you use the backup camera that all cars have had for a decade or more” / “I learned to drive without one, and you could too”?

I drive a car that doesn't have a backup camera and I wouldn't pay more for a car with a backup camera. I've never felt like I need it. I guess this is just how these augmentations work. By the time you've invested the time to learn the skill, you don't need the augmentation anymore. So you're left a bit puzzled by people who do. The people who use augmentations, or rely on them, have a more clear differential view.…

Cars without backup camera tend to have good mirrors (exceptions exist).

Once you put the camera there by default, the designers/engineers gets many extra degrees of freedom since they aren't constrained by visibility requirements. Those degrees of freedom are certain to be exercised! On the total this is probably probably a good thing, but it sucks when the rear camera(s) are covered with snow or grime.

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

#502

Post by LVB »

OliveronData wrote: post #354
OliveronData wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visit HN every so often but never felt the need to comment, until just a few minutes ago. Yes, what you've described, I also went through something similar. I've been programming little over two decades now. Been an autocomplete (ctags, intellisense, lsp) user throughout my career. Never had any real problems with them; they were convenient tools, nothing that different from someone using grep/fd etc. The codebase…

Part2: 1) LSPs. They are probably most productive tool in a programmers belt. Even now, if I had to work on a giant amorphous code base that changes on the whim of hundreds of individual maintainers, I would use an LSP. That said, in my opinion, they prevent you from forming and conveying your actual thoughts. Using an LSP is like having your sentence be completed by someone else. It's like riding a scooter everywher…

Appreciate the thoughts on this. I've been very conflicted about this topic lately. I'm an old Vim programmer, but I've leapt into AI-assistance earnestly. First it was out of curiosity and some amazement at how well they worked. Then, especially with Cursor, it was like, "Holy shit I'm flying through this stuff, basically hitting just tab. It's reading my mind."

But do I feel something weakening in me? Yeah. I don't have nearly the intimate mental model of where things are in code and how it ties together. It's like my brain is optimizing for the next thing that will prompt a useful tab completion, as opposed to tracking the whole. I don't like the feeling, but the actual output doesn't lie. When I switch to a new file and Cursor dumps in a 30 line function, without asking, that is correct based on what I was working as 5 second before, that's almost unquestionably faster. But at what cost...

I'm trying to find the sweet spot in all of this. There are some areas, like writing volumes of HTML/CSS/Tailwind, that I'll happily hand over to an LLM b/c I'm not great at it, I don't care to be, and it is a time compression of probably 50:1. OTOH, I'm thinking about dialing it back a bit on my backend and SQL code, which is a bit nearer and dearer. Simple autocomplete to save some typing is fine, but maybe lighten up on "Is this (20 lines) what you want? No? How about this? Or this? ..." tab-completion mania. I'd like to still be able to land the plane w/o autopilot.

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

#503

Post by fukawi2 »

thwarted wrote: post #80

The shell is my development environment. I open up new terminals and shells willy nilly. I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used. I think being surrounded by the code and being able to slice and dice it leads to a certain kind of familiarity that a tool that takes you right there…

Visual distraction in IDEs is amazing. I see my co-workers using Visual Studio or something, and I can't even identify the code they're working on among the mess of the screen. There's so much going on. The clean and pure display in vim in my terminal let's me just focus and get shit done. I honestly don't understand how they get anything done, but to each their own.

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

#504

Post by lispm »

I load the Lisp code of a project into the Lisp environment, which is the program and the development environment in one thing. Then all the information about the project is available in the running IDE/program combination. The thing then is fully reflective and introspective.

An example is GNU Emacs itself. For Emacs Lisp it is both the IDE and the application environment.

Similar integrated systems existed already earlier for Lisp and Smalltalk. Interlisp, the MIT Lisp Machine, Smalltalk 80 and others were examples where the IDE and the code was integrated.

OTOH, the combination of GNU Emacs and external Lisps, like Common Lisp systems, was basically LSP before LSP existed. There were tools like ILISP, which connected GNU Emacs to various external Lisp runtimes (which have all the development information about the loaded code). SLIME replaced it at some point in time and usually connected to external Lisps via network connections.

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

#505

Post by kapitar »

yodsanklai wrote: post #449
daltonpinto wrote: post #99

This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. 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. It felt…

> a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place How many programmers have the luxury to organize the code in the way that exactly suit them? most of the time, I work on code I didn't write myself. In the past, I used to try to refactor but I grew tired of having to justify why it's useful. Nowadays, I just deal with the code the best I can, and LSP is…

I’m sorry to say that some of the gnarliest and most boneheaded codebases I worked on were ones where I was the ‘architect’.

It was a startup environment and hectic, but I had total control over everything, more or less.

Just to say that having the luxury of a greenfield start doesn't mean you'll end up with a nice result.

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

#506

Post by danwills »

bazmattaz wrote: post #489
hliyan wrote: post #200

When you have a good mental model of the code base you're working on (and the libraries you use), you don't really need a lot of IDE features, and IDE features can sometimes hamper the formation of such a model. Let me explain: Twenty years ago, my IDE was two terminal windows running VI, vertically tiled. On the left, I open header files, and on the right, source files (I was a C++ programmer). When I wanted to look…

I’m not a developer but someone who is curious about development, can you explain what it means to have a good “mental model of the code”. Does that mean where you understand all code and what it does?

Yeah I think that's correct. It's the combined effect of being able to read the syntax of whatever language it is (Ie understanding code at a small-scale, which is different for all langs), and also to be able to understand/imagine the overall behaviour of it: at a larger-scale, which I think is largely language-independent. I think of it as similar to imagining how to do something or imagine how something works. The analogy could range from as simple as 'how to make a cup of tea' (a small script, or single method say) all the way up to 'how a car engine works'-level like big codebases (kernel, llvm, code-for-whole-app kinda thing).

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

#507

Post by avalys »

sateesh wrote: post #414
avalys wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm coding, most of my time is spent thinking about the right structure, organization, or solution. Or, debugging something that isn't acting as expected (which, again, is mostly thinking). I spend comparably little time actually writing the code. If there is an IDE available that works well out of the box, I'll certainly use whatever automation is available. But often it is broken, incomplete, slow, inaccurate,…

>> If there is an IDE available that works well out of the box, I'll certainly use whatever automation is available. But often it is broken, incomplete, slow, inaccurate, etc. ... I think you are unduly harsh here. As a longtime emacs user and who switched to IDE recently (ones that come from JetBrains) my experience hasn't been what you mention. Yes there is a bit of time (not huge) to get adjusted to the shortcuts…

If I'm working on a small hobby project by myself, or some open-source stuff, sure! I agree the Jetbrains stuff is great, I've been using them since 2001 with IntelliJ IDEA.

But most of the large industrial codebases I've worked on at FAANG companies break IDEs one way or another - either because of the build process, or the size of the codebase, etc.

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

#508

Post by nimih »

ozim wrote: post #492
daltonpinto wrote: post #99

This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. 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. It felt…

You are lucky to have small code base or one that you write mostly? With 6 other devs on the team and 5 apps our team supports there is no way I get code well organized especially when as a senior I have devops stuff to deal with meetings, explaining features to business, checking up support tickets and random stuff happening all the time. I don’t know the code base and there is no way to keep up. While I have to div…

I'm curious what you do when you encounter issues in a 3rd party dependency, or (since it sounds like you do dev-ops work) in an infrastructure process or tool whose code you didn't write? I use auto-complete and LSP features pretty heavily myself in my day-to-day development work, but when debugging an issue, I sometimes run into issues with a 3rd party library, or a kubernetes component, or whatever, and it's necessary to jump into those codebases and understand what's going on, whether the bug is with the library or with our own integration, whether it's more expedient to patch the dependency or write a workaround in our own code, &c. And in those cases, I generally do not have a LSP running, or my editor properly configured beyond basic syntax highlighting, and I have to rely on, presumably, the same techniques that devs who don't use LSPs at all employ in their day-to-day work: being able to quickly read and understand other peoples' code, being able to approximate jump-to-def with find/grep/ag/rg, being able to effectively trace datatypes and control flow through multiple definitions/files, being able to take effective notes to improve my working memory, and so on.

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

#509

Post by adambatkin »

camgunz wrote: post #326
jodrellblank wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " All these IDE+- things may be nice-to-have but most soon become crutches, and then you cannot live without them, and only walk their walk, not yours. " ... and? Cars have automatic chokes, power assisted steering, hydraulic brakes, airbags, seatbelts, auto-dimming mirrors, self-running wipers, and it's fine. People argue that driving a stick-shift is more authentic but even they use syncromesh and clutches, they…

You're erecting a pretty detailed strawman here. It's not that "raw dogging" code makes you a better developer; it's that specifically jump-to-definition and autocomplete make it too easy to create code bases that may as well be huge bags of functions and classes, and that skipping the mental work of organizing the code limits the fidelity of the mental model you can build.

Programming languages are complicated. Their standard libraries are extensive. Real world application are usually not trivial, because they often model real world processes, and the real world is messy.

Anything we can do to make writing software easier and more reliable, and reduce cognitive load, is going to benefit the software developers who are involved, and will make the systems better.

I'm sorry, if you can't jump-to-definition then you are wasting the company's time. It's something that all developers need to do and there's no reason we should be wasting time navigating a codebase when what you are looking for can be found instantly.

Same with autocomplete. I can type very fast, but autocomplete can type faster. Plus with the size of most APIs (even the ones built in to most programming languages) I have better things to spend brain space on. Is it list.empty(), clear(), empty(), truncate() or something else? With autocomplete I can find the function in want in 3 seconds (and read the docs inline, so I can tell that empty() doesn't empty the list, it tells me whether or not the list is empty) without lifting my fingers off my keyboard. Should I remember which is which? Maybe, but I don't care, and a jump between languages frequently enough that it's not worth the effort to keep track of silly things like that That's a contrived example, but hopefully you get the point.

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

#510

Post by throwaway346434 »

troupo wrote: post #324
zahlman wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 All the things that can be turned off/tuned. Strange that you don't spend the time learning the tool you admonish others for using

Arguably, they did turn it off: the whole IDE, at once.
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