[setr]

Just from a visual efficiency measure, it’s a good steeping stone between discovery and actual docs, especially if the autocomplete also includes the first bit of description - most functions of an API are quite obvious, and ideally aren’t doing anything surprising in them anyways that the name + minidisc would actually lead you astray.

Of course, a stepping stone , at the end of the day you still need to understand the core model and operations — but then you’re just dealing with age-old problem of RTFM; a problem that has existed long before autocomplete’s general availability, and long after. The only real change autocomplete brings in that regard is that people might accidentally read something while scanning a manual for the API calls… but that’s really never been good enough anyways, so it’s not much of a loss

[seanmcdirmid]

Auto completion also has the perverse effect of APIs developers relying on its existence to build large APIs that would be hard to use without autocomplete. I once counted 232 methods for a UI button in Java available through the auto complete menu. There is just no way to use that API by RTFMing, but with auto complete, you can just search for what you need as you need it.

Alot do the reason Java is the way it is is probably because auto completion gained in popularity at the same time it did.