Autocomplete is more for discoverability than saving on typed characters, letting you rely less on documentation and more on the actual interface you're interacting with
I rely less on documentation because I've got it all memorized due to not relying on autocomplete.
This is how I personally use it for discovery, anyway. The other day I was writing some Rust code and needed to remove a prefix from a &str. I tried a few common names after ‘.’ to see what would autocomplete, before finding that Rust calls this idea “trim_start_matches”. I then wanted to know what happens if the prefix wasn’t present, so I just hovered my mouse over it to read. Now, if I was writing Rust a lot, I would end up memorizing this anyway. I’ve never not written Python without a similar tool involved, yet I have a pretty close to encyclopedic knowledge of the standard library.
I feel similarly about go-to-definition. I often use it the first time I’m exploring code, or when I am debugging through some call stack, but I also always do read where I actually end up, and do form a mental map of the codebase. I’m not sure I buy either the contention in this thread that these “crutches” make developers uniformly worse, or that removing them would make all poor developers suddenly more disciplined
The classic example of getting this wrong is probably C# developers using IEnumerable when they should’ve used IQueryable.
The closest thing coming to mind to me is mixing up IEnumerable and IEnumerator when trying to define a coroutine.
Not every C# developer knows the difference, in my region of the world it’s an infamous mistake and is often the first thing you look for when tasked with improving bottlenecks in C# backends. On the flip-side, using IQuerable isn’t very efficient if what you wanted was to work on in memory collections.
There is an equally infamous somewhat related issue in Python with list vs generators. Especially common when non Python developers work with Python.
Thank you for the explanation.
Or literally any function from the standard library in C++, which will likely have undefined behaviour if you look at it wrong and didn't read the docs.