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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#51

Post by grayhatter »

softwaredoug wrote: post #31

Even if Claude writes 100% code, I think there will be a bifurcation between people who are finicky about 10 lines of code. And those finicky about high level product experiences. I think the 10 lines of code people worry their jobs now become obsolete. In cases where the code required googling how to do X with Y technology, that's true. That's just going to be trivially solvable. And it will cause us to not need as…

> I think the 10 lines of code people worry their jobs now become obsolete.

I'm gonna assume you think you're in the other camp, but please correct me if I'm mistaken.

I'd say I'm in the 10 lines of code camp, but I'd say that group is the least afraid of fictionalized career threat. The people that obsess over those 10 lines are the same people who show up to fix the system when prod goes down. They're the ones that change 2 lines of code to get a 35% performance boost.

It annoys me a lot when people ship broken code. Vibe coded slop is almost always broken, because of those 10 lines.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#52

Post by zozbot234 »

rf15 wrote: post #9

This is pointing out one factor of vibecoding that is talked about too little: that it feels good, and that this feeling often clouds people's judgment on what is actually achieved (i.e. you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams)

> you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams

Your control over the code is your prompt. Write more detailed prompts and the control comes back. (The best part is that you can also work with the AI to come up with better prompts, but unlike with slop-written code, the result is bite-sized and easily surveyable.)

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#54

Post by division_by_0 »

lazyfolder wrote: post #17
rf15 wrote: post #9

This is pointing out one factor of vibecoding that is talked about too little: that it feels good, and that this feeling often clouds people's judgment on what is actually achieved (i.e. you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams)

Definitely. And it’s hard to separate out whether the person is actually more productive or feels more productive.

Yes, this (higher perceived vs. lower actual productivity) was probably at least true for early 2025.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#55

Post by echelon »

sgarland wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

This is what I don't understand: everyone who thinks we're still relevant with the same job and salary expectations.

Everything just changed. Fundamentally.

If you don't adapt to these tools, you will be slower than your peers. Few businesses will tolerate that.

This is competitive cycling. Claude is a modern bike with steroids. You can stay on a penny farthing, but that's not advised.

You can write 10x the code - good code. You can review and edit it before committing it. Nothing changes from a code quality perspective. Only speed.

What remains to be seen is how many of us the market needs and how much the market will pay us.

I'm hoping demand and comp remain constant, but we'll see.

The one thing I will say is that we need ownership in these systems ASAP, or we'll become serfs to computing.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#56

Post by chasd00 »

rf15 wrote: post #9

This is pointing out one factor of vibecoding that is talked about too little: that it feels good, and that this feeling often clouds people's judgment on what is actually achieved (i.e. you lost control of the code and are running more and more frictionless on hopes and dreams)

It _does_ feel good, I know what you mean. I don’t understand why exactly but there’s def an emotion associated with vibe coding. It may be related to the feeling you get when you get some code working and finish a requirement or solve a problem. Maybe vibe coding gives you a shortcut to that endorphin. I think it’s going to be particularly important to manage that feeling and balance with reality. You know, I wonder how similar this reaction is to the endorphins from YouTube shorts or other social media. If it’s as addicting (and it’s looking that way) but requires a subscription and tied to work instead of entertainment then the justification for the billions and billions of investment dollars is obvious. Interesting times indeed.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#57

Post by jlarocco »

sgarland wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

It's even worse - project management where you have to micromanage every thing the AI is doing.

But yeah, if anybody can do it, the salaries are going to plummet. You don't need a CS degree to tell the AI to try again.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#58

Post by interstice »

sgarland wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer. If you can't code by hand professionally anymore, what are you being paid to do? Bring the specs to the LLMs? Deal with the customers so the LLMs don't have to?

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

Doesn't this mean the ones that should be really worried are the project managers, since the SWE has better understanding over what's being done and can now orchestrate from a PM level?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#59

Post by freeopinion »

I think it is pretty indisputable that there is a valuable place for AI. I recently had to interact with a very horrible db schema. The best approach I came up with to solve my challenge involved modelling a table with 300 columns. Converting some sql ddl to a Rust struct was simple but tedious work. A prompt with less than 15 words guided an AI to produce the 900+ loc for me. It took a couple seconds to scan it to see that each field had both annotations I needed and the datatypes were sane.

That is exactly the type of help that makes me happy to have AI assistance. I have no idea how much electricity it consumed. Somebody more clever than me might have prompted the AI to generate the other 100 loc that used the struct to solve the whole problem. But it would have taken me longer to build the prompt than it took me to write the code.

Perhaps an AI might have come up with a more clever solution. Perhaps memorializing a prompt in a comment would be super insightful documentation. But I don't really need or want AI to do everything for me. I use it or not in a way that makes me happy. Right now that means I don't use it very much. Mostly because I haven't spent the time to learn how to use it. But I'm happy.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#60

Post by siva7 »

falloutx wrote: post #29
woeirua wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every engineer in the next two years needs to prepare themselves for this conversation to play out (from Office Space): > Bob Slydell: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers? > Tom Smykowski: Yes, yes that's right. > Bob Porter: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people? > Tom Smykowski:…

PMs can always keep their jobs because they appear to be working and they keep contact with the execs directly. They have taken a bigger and bigger part of the tech pie over the years and soon they finally take it all.

That's not what i am seeing being played out at a big corp. In reality everyone gets thrown under the bus, no matter if c-level or pleb if they don't appear to know how to drive the ai metrics up. Just being a PM won't save your job any more than that of the dev who doesn't know how to acquire and use new skills. On the contrary, jobs of the more competent devs are safer than those of some managers here who don't know the tech.
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