Comment by agentultra

I find that I don’t use heavy IDE features much.

I just use a TAGS file for definition lookups. It’s fast to generate. Every editor worth its salt understands the format. It’s fast.

It’s perhaps slow but I do tend to use my own memory instead of autocomplete. As I use a module more frequently I tend to recall it from memory and know what I want ahead of time. So eventually I get faster than autocomplete. And bonus I get to know the codebase.

I find I make up for the initial slowness because I do most of my thinking before I hit the keyboard. Sometimes the autocomplete is faster than I can type but often it elects to select the wrong thing by default and it takes me more willpower and key presses to select the right one than to simply type what I want.

Slight gains at the keyboard don’t equate to much for me.

Although if you watch my streams you can see me smooth brain my way through stuff without much in the way of IDE tooling. Often when I’m streaming I’m programming off the cuff, chatting with folks, and generally more distracted than I usually am when programming alone. I also look up documentation manually a lot either because I want to show the stream or because I’m so distracted I have a memory like a fish.

Over time though I prefer to internalize and learn than to rely on tools to do the thinking and recall for me.

I don’t really use AI tools. I find reviewing the code mentally exhausting and tedious. I prefer to simply write the code I want rather than try to clumsily tell a robot how to. Plain language is sufficiently vague for conversation and too vague for programming tasks.