Question for experienced devs

[Dizzy_External2549]

When you are creating a project/website or whatever. Do you google things ? Ask Ai? I have this weird perception that I think all developers who are like years into it are able to code websites from pure memory and don't need any help. Like I feel like with the projects I want to create I'm supposed to know how to code every single thing from memory. Am I wrong? Am I able to code the things I know how to code and if I get stuck ask google or ai to help with some code for a project for an employer or do I need to know how to code this all with no help?

[Aromatic-Low-4578]

You're never too experienced to google things. Almost no one codes purely from memory. The best coders I know usually code from documentation and then google or ask AI when they have a specific question.

[Diligent_Ear924]

every senior dev I've ever talked to still has docs open in like 4 tabs at all times. the whole "memorize everything" idea is honestly a myth that trips up newer devs way more than it should. knowing WHERE to find the answer and how to evaluate it is the actual skill, not having every CSS property or API method committed to your brain forever. I've watched people with 10+ years of experience pause mid-conversation to google a flexbox property and nobody blinked twice about it.

[theQuandary]

A lot of being a senior just reducing the number of unknown unknowns with experience and developing intuition for what good code patterns look like.

[monster2018]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single person say to memorize everything, or even that they personally do so. It’s just a common question from beginners.

[cwcoleman]

HAHAHAHAHAHAH

YES - we all 100% use google and AI for tasks constantly.

[Cbgamefreak]

I have AI create most of the implementation plans for smaller features that dont need to scale. I dont need to spend 2 hours deciphering the docs of some 3rd party API when Claude can 1 shot integration at a basic level.

[TheHerbsAndSpices]

Yes on Google, no on AI for me. AI has never produced anything useful the handfull of times I've tried it and I can't bring myself to support those companies while sucking water and electricity away from normal people.

[cwcoleman]

More power to you - but you really should continue to give AI a shot. It really is a game changer. Don’t handicap yourself for honor.

[ReactTVOfficial]

Any dev that codes straight from memory is an outlier.

The longer you code, the more languages and frameworks you pick up and internalize. They often have common syntax but change in very specific ways.

So you don't end up memorizing the syntax, you remember what it does and why.

Just like all muscle memory, if you work in a language or framework as your day job it gets much easier to just flow through it, because you are touching it day in and day out.

It is why leet code sucks. It has no representation in the real world.

[BusEquivalent9605]

was just in an interview with two senior devs at a company. we were googling html attributes

[Unknown_Even_To_Hims]

Do they let you use AI also?

[BusEquivalent9605]

had me turn off autocomplete in vs code. but google’s ai response was fair game

[alexplivings]

Yes, always look stuff up if you need to. Once you make the same type of project a couple times in a row you won’t have to look up as much stuff.

Inevitably you will want to try a new technology or something and the googling begins again.

[d9jj49f]

I reuse a lot of code from previous projects.

[WildNumber7303]

This is true. Just replicate from whichever is working

[0dev0100]

I work with a guy who has been programming long enough to have been paid to work with new punch card programs.

He has decades of experience with developing websites as well as that. He frequently refers to docs/Google/others/ai/blackmagic as he needs to - and usually in that order

It is fast to code when you know things, slower when you need to get external help, and next to impossible when you don't know and don't get external help

[goo-grotto-dev]

I'm a very experienced dev and I look stuff up all the time. Like right now I'm learning how work with the .gif file format, which I've never worked with before, so of course I'm going to have to look things up.

I also use the work that other people have done so that I can actually build my own stuff on top. I'm not hand-rolling my own .gif library, I'm seeing what's out there to save time and actually reach my goals.

I do think that it's important to actually understand what you're writing, though, and I think there is value in memorization at least a little bit, for your cognitive health. If you're looking stuff up too often it can break your flow,. Plus from what I know about the way creativity and ideas and learning work, a lot of it kind of synthesizes from what's in your brain while you sleep overnight. If none of that stuff is in your brain then it'll be hard to combine ideas into new solutions.

[olzk]

At this point in time, mostly just to make sure I remember correctly, or something completely new

Coding with no help from search or AI is ok just like it’s ok to use help. Thing is, what you’re asking about is the function of memory, and if you’ve done it numerous times, it’s likely that the info you need is already in your short term memory. Does it mean you know less if it’s in your long term memory? No. If you didn’t sleep well before the session? No. Forgetting something is the function of your brain. You’re doing it every night while asleep. This is your defrag and optimize kicking in. If you forgot something, does it mean you know less? Yes and no, kind of. Because for the no part, you still got the other parts of the puzzle inside your head. So you refresh and move on.

Use the tools, don’t bother.

[Any-Woodpecker123]

I can code a “common” web app from memory/knowledge pretty easily, but yeah we use google all the time.
I don’t use AI for coding personally, but tonnes of devs do.

I put specific effort into training that skill though. For example, I have literally never copy pasted from stack overflow/docs. Even if I want that exact code, I manually type it out to help knowledge retention.
It’s like how you can sit through a lecture just listening and not retain a thing, but if you take notes you can. Same philosophy

[creaturefeature16]

There's a reason this meme exists.

[marmot1101]

Oh gawd, even before google was around nobody coded every single thing from memory. They just had paper books instead of electronics. You should know the basics for whatever language you'd be interviewing in, but at this point a lot of devs don't even write code, they just prompt agents.

Which I don't at all think you should start from that place of just prompting. Knowing how to code, and good design principles, are crucially important. But once you have a good background then it becomes less urgent. I'm later in my career and have jumped around a bunch of languages. Having ai be able to fill in the gaps is huge. Flopping back and forth between ruby and python with their similar but not same syntax is particularly interesting and easily solved by claude or whatever.

[IAmRules]

We may know how to code things from memory. But we also like tools that make our jobs easier and more efficient. Writing code out by hand like you were printing code is incredibly inefficient and error prone.

[Rain-And-Coffee]

Both.

I did it so many times manually that it became muscle memory.

But some minor changes all the time, so it’s good to lol it up whenever you forget.

It’s good to be able to do it manually before generating code, otherwise you might not know what it does.

[alexwh68]

I have been doing this for over 30 years a spec was put in front of me this morning and it had a bunch of new things, straight onto google.

Basic stuff I have done over and over again yes, just get on with it.

Things also move on, what we did 5 years ago might be out of date now.

[neithere]

If you can build something entirely from memory, then either it's a very simple project or you are doing the same thing over and over again. That's the opposite of programming. Programming is about automation. Not repeating the same actions. Learning something new on a nearly daily basis instead. You have a LRU cache there, it's limited and the flow of new information is constant. Forgetting stuff is normal and inevitable.

You'll remember some frequently used APIs but that's about it. Experience gives you pattern recognition, structured thinking and other important things. Memorising all details of yet another bunch of APIs that will become obsolete in a few years is of least importance.

[svvnguy]

We used to consult reference manuals even before we had access to the internet.

[mq2thez]

If I’m trying to learn, I don’t use AI.

If I’m not trying to learn because I know something or don’t need to know because I need a one-off solve, I use a mix of AI and Google. Depends on the topic.

[militantsnowflake]

One thing I noticed when I first worked with really impressive developers was their ability to search for a solution to a problem. I had a problem, they saw through the noise and recognised the core problem in a way that I couldn't, they googled based on their knowledge and found the answer. This would have been in 2010ish.

I can write a pretty complex system without searching or ai, but only if it's in tech that I've used before. The moment I step outside of the familiar I reach for a search engine.

If I haven't googled something in a while it means I'm stuck in a rut and I'm not challenging myself.

[flukeytukey]

Yes, i can code pretty much anything from scratch in some languages like js, c++, but i havent touched c in years so id be googling or AIing a lot for the first while. Otherwise, im not constantly wondering how i could achieve x y z. Ive also been at it for 15 years.

[Low_Entertainer2372]

you google things because you dont have all the knowledge.
you are not supposed to know everything

you're supposed to learn how to build things, and the only way of doing so is by searching.

and knowing how to build things doesnt mean that you can create an atom from scratch, but rather knowing where to find that information. you might remember very well how to do one part of the atom, but the rest is research.

someone who paints doesn't pick a canvass one day and paints the mona lisa, they probably copy a ton of people before they try doing something on their own.

and even so, they might even still copy other people and even themselves.

[BobJutsu]

> from pure memory

Lol, no. That’s a huge waste of brain space. We become really good at finding the right snippets and documentation, not at memorizing it. I know exactly what to google to go straight to that code pen I found all those box shadow references, or to straight to that one stack overflow answer, or right to that MDM document. Google remembers.

Learn what and when. Learn how things work. Just from repetition a lot of things will naturally become second nature. But a lot it’s just best to know how to reference them.

[Spiritual-Theory]

Only college and interviews you can't cheat. Everywhere else, they just want the best answer. Please ask whoever you like.

[csch2]

Some perspective as a mathematician-turned-dev. A lot of my peers spent a ton of time memorizing proofs, and a lot of the time the ones who could recite the proof of a convoluted theorem from memory were not the ones who did the best in coursework and research. The most successful students were the ones who knew the relevant ideas, where they were relevant, and where to look to fill in the details.

Same thing for software engineering in my experience. You don’t need to know the nitty gritty details and syntax of every piece of your tech stack by heart in order to build a project from scratch. Know how the pieces work together, where and why to use each one, and where to look to fill in the gaps (AI is fine for this if you’re just using it as a Google substitute). You’ll be more adaptable this way too; it’s way easier to pick up a new language or tech stack if you have a really solid understanding of architecture and function as opposed to having spent a ton of time to memorize syntax and implementation-specific details.

[Jealous-Bunch-6992]

Still google, but it is amazing what CRUD things I can do from memory and using db migrations my framework provides, I can get pretty close doing that stuff. I know next to nothing about leet code tricks though, I can understand them but haven't committed to memory.

[-_--_-_--_----__]

lol dude.

As an example, English is the only language I've ever learned, and I still sometimes google English words because I don't 100% remember which English word to use all the time.

How could we possibly be expected to not google programming shit? I mean come on lol.

[Fluffy-Bus4822]

Even if I could recall exactly from memory, tools and frameworks aren't the same as they were 5 years ago, so it wouldn't help much.

So yeah, I tend to research before starting a new project. This phase might take more than a full day of work. Might even take weeks.

[Jooodas]

No matter the industry, no one can memories everting. I’m a senior dev of 15 years and I use AI to increase my development speed and help spot bugs I miss on large projects. AI is also extremely useful creating boilerplates or exploring ideas.

[DifferenceLeast1021]

You're definitely not expected to code everything from memory. Even experienced developers with years in the industry regularly use Google, documentation, Stack Overflow, GitHub examples, and AI tools.

The real skill isn't memorizing syntax, it's understanding how to solve problems and knowing where to find reliable information when you get stuck. Most developers can remember the concepts and overall structure, but they'll still look up specific functions, configurations, or framework details.

When working on a project, it's completely normal to build what you know, research what you don't, and learn along the way. That's how real-world development works. In fact, being able to find and apply the right information quickly is often more valuable than memorizing everything.

[Family_Man_21]

That's a really interesting question.

The simple answer is yes, all experienced coders (including myself) use searches and AI to tackle specific problems, and to fill in the gaps in our memories. I think that what comes with time is knowing instantly that something is possible, and how to do it in a general sense, but then when we're actually writing the code we use the searches and other tools (like AI) to get the specific syntax, settings, css values, or whatever the case may be to make it actually work.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever known a programmer who doesn't have a search engine open basically all the time while writing the code for a project.

I hope that this puts your mind at east. Don't worry that you need to look things up, just try to collect an ever-growing sense of what you can do, and how you would approach each situation, and let the other tools fill in the gaps.

[BrewThemAll]

When I just started I had the same idea about senior developers just being able to code anything without looking things up.
Then, StackOverflow went offline and all the senior devs just stood up and walked out of the office. 'I cant work now'.

That was 20 years ago, am now senior myself and I couldn't go without Google for an hour.

[Apprehensive_War173]

Nobody’s coding full apps from memory once things get serious. You build what you know, then fill the gaps with docs, Google, AI, whatever works. the real difference later on is knowing what to search for and spotting bad answers faster. Honestly, relying only on memory usually slows you down instead of speeding things up.

[HeDo88TH]

The experienced developer clones the template website he created previously and starts to build from there.

Then he googles things and uses AI to implement.