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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

#91

Post by chasd00 »

acedTrex wrote: post #6

I will do what i know gives me the best possible and fastest outcome over the long term, 5-10 year period. And that remains largely neovim and by hand. The process of typing code gives me a deeper understanding of the project that lets me deliver future features FASTER. I'm fundamentally convinced that my investment into deep long term grokking of a project will allow me to surpass primarily LLM projects over the lon…

This is the way. I think we’re in for some rough years at first but then what you described will settle in to the “best practice” (I hate that term). I look forward to the really bizarre bugs and incidents that make the news in the next 2-3 years. …Well as long as they’re not from my teams hah :)

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#92

Post by raincole »

CurleighBraces wrote: post #14

Has anyone got any insights into what hiring software engineers looks like these days? As someone currently with a job and not hiring it is hard to imagine. Has there been any sort of paradigm shift in coding interviews? Is LLM use expected/encouraged or frowned upon? If companies are still looking for people to write code by hand then perhaps the author is onto something, if however we as an industry are moving on,…

It's obvious: companies will require both hand-coding and ai-coding skills. Job seeking has been hoop-jumping for many years, so why not one extra hoop?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#94

Post by zozbot234 »

agentultra wrote: post #81
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. 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…

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping t…

> I don’t feel like the boss is hot to replace me with power tools. Or to lay off half my team because we have power tools now.

That has more to do with how much demand there is for what you're doing. With software eating the world and hardware constraints becoming even more visible due to the chips situation, we can expect that there will be plenty of work for SWE's who are able to drive their coding agents effectively. Being the "top" (reasoning) or the "bottom" half is a matter of choice - if you slack off and are not highly committed to delivering quality product, you end up doing the "bottom" part and leaving the robot in the driver's seat.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#95

Post by softwaredoug »

grayhatter wrote: post #51
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…

I’m probably in the 10 lines of code camp

At the same time I make enough silly mistakes hand coding it feels irresponsible to NOT have a coding LLM generate code. But I look at all the code and (gasp) make manual changes :)

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#96

Post by sp1nningaway »

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)

Yeah I get a lot of value from vibe coding and think it is the future of how we work but I’ve started to become suspicious of the pure dopamine rush it gives me. I don’t like that it is a strange combo of the sweaty feeling of playing StarCraft all night and finishing a term paper at the last minute.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#97

Post by zemvpferreira »

agentultra wrote: post #81
woeirua wrote: post #5

This is no different then carpentry. Yes, all furniture can now be built by machines. Some people still choose to build it by hand. Does that make them less productive? Yes. Will they ever carve furniture by hand for a business? Probably not. Can they still enjoy the act of working with the wood? Yes. 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…

I’ve heard this metaphor before and I don’t think it works well. For one, a power tool like a bandsaw is a centaur technology. I, the human, am the top half of the centaur. The tool drives around doing what I tell it to do and helping me to do the task faster (or at all in some cases). A GenAI tool is a reverse-centaur technology. The algorithm does almost all of the work. I’m the bottom half of the centaur helping t…

Have you heard of the Luddites I wonder?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#98

Post by echelon »

yoz-y wrote: post #77
echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - go…

I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.

It's not dogshit if you're steering.

That's what so many of you are not getting.

Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision.

I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just fine.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#100

Post by cat_plus_plus »

shmerl wrote: post #61

Programming is a creative work. Replacing human creativity with pseudo parrot code generation impacts this process in bad ways. It's same reason many artists despise using AI for art. Bean counters don't care about creativity and art though, so they'll never get it.

Good for artists I guess, I wouldn't know because I am not one. The best I can manage is drawing a stick figure of a cat. Years back I was working on a Mac app and I needed an icon. So I talked to an artist and she asked for $5K to make one for me. I couldn't justify spending so much on a hobby that I didn't know if it would go anywhere so I wrote a little app that procedurally generated me some basic sucky icon. I am sure Gordon Ramsay is also not impressed with cooking skills of my microwave, I just don't know how his objections practically relate to getting me fed daily.
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