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by seandougall 2927 days ago
I also find autocompletion invaluable when I'm working with an API I don't interact with regularly enough to have everything memorized, mere mortal that I am. I might not remember exactly what naming convention the methods conform to, or what order the arguments need to be in, and autocompletion gets me both of those essentially for free, without having to pull up the docs for every method call.
1 comments

I can agree with this — if you’re really working on a codebase that you rarely interact with, then sure, “jump to” and autocomplete features are helpful.

Over my career, the relative amount of time spent doing that is really tiny though. It doesn’t invalidate the value of autocomplete or “jump to” features for this use case, but for me it’s not common enough to matter a whole lot. Other forms of searching work just fine too.

My other comments are written regarding the case when you’re hopping around an in-house codebase, and beyond some initial burn-in, you should have a lot of working knowledge of the details.