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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?

#551

Post by UltraSane »

jodrellblank wrote: post #302
svilen_dobrev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some colleague some time ago argued that one can write code without much/any spaces, because, "you can see, it's colored differently".. sounding like, "i am breathing". 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. Just turning off syntax coloring freaks recent developers.. even quite good ones.. i observed it. The…

> " 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…

I find it so ironic that a surprisingly large fraction of computer programmers are such curmudgeonly Luddites spurning the most basic tools that make their job easier. Meanwhile engineers are using Solidworks to model mechanism that would be nearly or actually impossible to create without it and then running a finite element analysis to verify it is strong enough and using selective laser sintering to create prototypes for testing and then using MasterCAM to optimize the machining process and then sending it to a $300,000 5 axis milling machine with automated tool changer. Then the part's dimensional tolerances are verified using a $200,000 Coordinate Measuring Machine that is calibrated using gauge blocks made using laser interferometry and accurate to plus or minus a few hundred atoms.

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

#552

Post by IgorPartola »

jedberg wrote: post #452

This post just gave me an epiphany. I work with some programmers in their 20s. They are some of the best programmers I've ever met. But they never seem to enter "flow state". In fact, they welcome distractions. And now I think I know why. When I was coming up, you needed to enter flow state to be a good programmer. Because you had to keep track of all the functions and their signatures, all the different flows and ob…

So one of my current projects has a part that is five coordinated microservices. Two of them need to use concurrency that modern tooling doesn’t love out of the box. The entire system has to have strict timing and low latency. Autocomplete can help with some pieces but this isn’t actually that much code. What it requires is being able to visualize the whole thing, be able to test exactly how the underlying libraries respond to different kinds of errors, and how to prevent deadlocks. I have yet to meet an LLM capable of reasoning about deadlocks, catching signals within threads of a process, correct semantics of anonymous pipes and their buffers, etc. In order to work on something like this it does require flow state. You can’t just casually add a few lines or rework some module. You need to visualize the entire system, including error flows, before you can start changing it.

I could likely use some basic autocomplete for things like a function signature, but most times I have the function implementation on one side of my screen and where it’s being used on the other and chances are I’m changing both at the same time. Vim is wonderful for this kind of work.

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

#553

Post by jedberg »

IgorPartola wrote: post #552
jedberg wrote: post #452

This post just gave me an epiphany. I work with some programmers in their 20s. They are some of the best programmers I've ever met. But they never seem to enter "flow state". In fact, they welcome distractions. And now I think I know why. When I was coming up, you needed to enter flow state to be a good programmer. Because you had to keep track of all the functions and their signatures, all the different flows and ob…

So one of my current projects has a part that is five coordinated microservices. Two of them need to use concurrency that modern tooling doesn’t love out of the box. The entire system has to have strict timing and low latency. Autocomplete can help with some pieces but this isn’t actually that much code. What it requires is being able to visualize the whole thing, be able to test exactly how the underlying libraries…

If you'll allow me to shill my company for a second, I'd be interested if you could take a look at DBOS[0] and tell me if it might simplify your problem. It's designed for making microservices a lot easier to reason about, and might help make your system a lot simpler.

[0] https://docs.dbos.dev/why-dbos

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

#554

Post by evjan »

”In my experience, the stronger programmers don't use an IDE and also have no problem producing code at the same speed as IDE users. I also find that the code produced with an IDE is lower quality. I have no idea why”

Zed Shaw in Learn C The Hard Way. For some reason, the most brilliant devs I’ve worked with all used Vim, so I can echo this statement.

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

#555

Post by olejorgenb »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #404
iamsaitam wrote: post #299

I think purism is a slippery slope for experienced people, I too suffer from this to a certaint extent. It's natural to fight change as you get older and it's part of the struggle to change your behavior and adapt to the changing times. Short comment regarding syntax highlighting, unless you have some impairement, I think everyone benefits from this. It's something that helps you recognize patterns much faster and yo…

I don't benefit from syntax highlighting and don't see how anyone does. It's pretty, but doesn't convey useful information that isn't already right there in the syntax itself.

Function arguments vs global functions/variables vs local variables. Although maybe not technically syntax highlighting many IDEs can do this. Ie. Making non-local information local.

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

#556

Post by motorest »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #174
motorest wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the fundamental truth that those pushing AI as a replacement for programmers miss (intentionally or not). I think this blend of comment shows a good dose of ignorance discussing the role of AI as a replacement for programmers. It's not like PMs are suddenly seeing engineers vanish from software projects. It's that AI makes developers so much more productive that you only need a subset of them to meet your w…

> LLMs can instantly review changes and suggest ways to improve it, which would require either reading up on the topic or asking a fellow engineer on payroll to spend their time doing the same job. If we train ourselves out of being able to do these tasks, won't we find it harder to recognise when the AI makes mistakes?

> If we train ourselves out of being able to do these tasks, won't we find it harder to recognise when the AI makes mistakes?

We are not skipping these tasks. We are using tools to help us avoid doing drudge work that can be automated away.

Code linters eliminate the need to prettify code. Do developers find it harder to recognize indentation inconsistencies? Syntax highlighters simplify picking up code constructs. Do developers find it harder to read code? Template engines simplify generating new source files with programming constructs. Do developers find it harder to read code? Heck, auto complete helps developers write whole code blocks faster. Do developers find it harder to write a function?

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

#557

Post by motorest »

bregma wrote: post #287
motorest wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the fundamental truth that those pushing AI as a replacement for programmers miss (intentionally or not). I think this blend of comment shows a good dose of ignorance discussing the role of AI as a replacement for programmers. It's not like PMs are suddenly seeing engineers vanish from software projects. It's that AI makes developers so much more productive that you only need a subset of them to meet your w…

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

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

I pointed out the fact that AI does not replace programmers. You still need people between keyboards and chairs delivering code and maintaining systems.

What AI does is make developers far more efficient at their job.

If you have employees that do their work in less time, they do not get more free time. They get more work. The moment their workforce is more productive, employees start to need fewer employees to deliver the same volume of work.

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

#558

Post by olejorgenb »

beej71 wrote: post #483

I admit this is my personal shortcoming, but when the IDE pops up anything while I'm typing I find it very distracting and damaging to my flow. It feels like someone interrupting me every spoken syllable. And they commonly cover up other code. I want help when I explicitly ask for it. Younger devs might not have this issue.

You can turn off the "auto" part in "autocomplete". IMO it's a bad default that it's on.

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

#559

Post by ethagnawl »

SoftTalker wrote: post #61

I turn off autocomplete everywhere I can. Whether web searches, composing code, or anything else, I do not want the computer anticipating what I am about to type. I find it is often wrong, and always distracting. Yes, I try to learn the language well enough that I know the parameters of common functions. If I don't, I consult the docs. If I need to find the definition of a function in another file, I use grep.

> I turn off autocomplete everywhere I can

I'm the same way. I have never, ever been pleasantly surprised by auto completion when I did not explicitly enable it -- can't think of on instance of me doing this, either. In particular, web-based code playgrounds, IDEs, etc. auto-inserting quotes and parentheses drive me mad. Google Docs also frustrates me with their word/phrase suggestion widget that I can't seem to ever fully turn off.

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

#560

Post by dataflow »

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…

> Relying on features like Ctrl+Click to find where things are located worries me. Why? Because it can mask structural flaws in the codebase. If we can't intuitively figure out where something belongs, that’s a sign the codebase lacks structure—and that should motivate us to refactor it.

This argument sounds nice in theory but it seems to have some serious fundamental flaws w.r.t. "how do you code without an LSP":

- What do you do about dependent names? i.e. names that resolve to something different based on various conditions in the code? They might be defined in multiple places conditionally, their default definitions might be overridden for particular cases (and you'd have no idea if you just saw the default definition - think "template specialization" if you write C++), they might have different definitions on different platforms... do you seriously want to explore the entire codebase manually with all the compiler flags to figure out what something resolves to?

- What do you do about code that you can't refactor? Like third party code?

- Not every question the IDE/LSP answers is of the form "where does this belong". What do you do about things that aren't names? Like say, there's a quantity calculated at compile time and want to know its value? I'm not talking Math.PI here, I'm talking about something like STACK_BUFFER_SIZE. It can easily be something like (sizeof(T) + sizeof(U) * 4) / sizeof(void*). How much of your life do you want to spend simulating the compiler in your brain vs. having it just tell you what it already knows?

etc.

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