[selfhoster1312]

This is insulting to our craft, like going to a woodworkers convention and assuming "most of [them]" are using 3D-printers and laser cutters.

Half the developers I know still don't use LSP (and they're not necessarily older devs), and even the full-time developers in my circle resist their bosses forcing Copilot or Claude down their throats and use in fact 0 AI. Living in France, i don't know a single developer using AI tools, except for drive-by pull-request submitters i have never met.

I understand the world is nuanced and there are different dynamics at play, and my circles are not statistically representative of the world at large. Likewise, please don't assume this literally world-eating fad (AI) is what "most of us" are doing just because that's all the cool kids talk about.

[Alupis]

> Half the developers I know still don't use LSP

Your IDE either uses an LSP or has its own baked-in proprietary version of a LSP. Nobody, and I mean nobody, working on real projects is "raw dawgin" a text file.

Most modern IDE's support smart auto-complete, a form of AI assistance, and most people use that at a minimum. Further, most IDE's do support advanced AI assisted auto-complete via copilot, codex, Claude or a plethora of other options - and many (or most) use them to save time writing and refactoring predictable, repetitive portions of their code.

Not doing so is like forgoing wheels on your car because technically you can just slide it upon the ground.

The only people I've seen in the situation you've described are students at university learning their first language...

[unmole]

I guess I'm nobody then.

I write code exclusively in vim. Unless you want to pretend that ctags is a proprietary version of an LSP, I'm not using an LSP either. I work at a global tech company, and the codebase I work on powers the datacenter networks of most hyperscalers. So, very much a real project. And I'm not an outlier, probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs.

[Alupis]

Ctags are very limited and unpopular. Most people do not use them, by any measurement standard.

Using a text editor without LSP or some form of intellisense in 2026 is in the extreme minority. Pretending otherwise is either an attempted (and misguided) "flex" or just plain foolishness.

> probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs

Both vim and emacs support LSP and intellisense. You can even use copilot in both. Maybe you're just not aware...

[1718627440]

When your language has neither name-mangling nor namespaces, a simple grep gets you a long way, without language specific support. Ma editor (not sure if it counts as IDE?) uses only words in open documents for completions and that is generally enough. If I feel like I want to use a lot of methods from a particular module I can just open that module.

[selfhoster1312]

I don't use an IDE under the common definition. All my developer friends use neovim, emacs, helix or Notepad++. I'm not a student. The people i have in mind are not students.

Your ai-powered friends and colleagues are not statistically representative. The world is nuanced, everyone is unique, and we're not sociologists running a long study about what "most of us" are doing.

> forgoing wheels on your car

Now you're being silly. Not using AI to program is more akin to not having a rocket engine on your car. Would it go faster? Sure. Would it be safer? Definitely not. Do some people enjoy it? Sure. Does anyone not using it miss it? No.

[TiredOfLife]

Like 99.9999 of woodworkers already cheat by using metal and not wood tools

[selfhoster1312]

I didn't say using different technology was cheating, and metal tools are certainly part of woodworking for thousands of years so that's not really comparable.

It's also very different because there's a qualitative change between metal woodworking tools and a laser cutter. The latter requires electricity and massive investments.

[TiredOfLife]

Metal tools also require massive investments compared to plain wood tools.