[gordaco]

Yeah. Autocomplete is about the least useful function of an IDE. The real killer features IMHO are the automatic refactoring tools (method renaming, addition of function arguments, etc) and, in languages that support it, the continuous build that points out errors and warnings as you type them. Code navigation features (go to definition, find every place where this function is called, open file by class name...) are also huge time savers. Autocomplete has its uses but ultimately it's not such a big deal. 99% of the time I use it, I already know what I want to write, and I just use it when I don't remember exactly the order of some function arguments or something like that.

EDIT: I'd like to add that the real speed comes when you have lots of keyboard commands ingrained in your muscle memory. There is a learning curve and it takes some time, but when you're comfortable with mapping certain very high level operations to a combination of 2 or 3 keys, the increase in speed is tremendous. The downside is that changing IDEs becomes a bit painful, so you built some kind of dependence. But this is not what the article is about.

[raducu]

I have ADHD and have terrible memory for names. I'm not even using autocomplete that much, but the navigation in IDE really helps.... or hinders me from learning class/method names.

I have a very wiered and convoluted style of search and navigation, all to avoid remembering names, people who see me coding are really stunded by the way I navigate code.

The upside is I do really well with new languages/projects, unless we are talking millions of lines of code and hundreds of modules, then I begin to struggle again.