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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

#121

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

Engineering is just going to evolve.

There's going to be minimal "junior" jobs where you're mostly implementing - I guess roughly equivalent to working wood by hand - but there's still going to be jobs resembling senior level FAANG jobs for the foreseeable future.

Someone's going to have to do the work, babysit the algorithm, know how to verify that it actually works, know how to know that it actually does what it's supposed to do, know how to know if the people who asked for it actually knew what they were asking for, etc.

Will pay go down? Who knows. It's easy to imagine a world in which this creates MORE demand for seniors, even if there's less demand for "all SWEs" because there's almost zero demand for new juniors.

And at least for some time, you're going to need non-trivial babysitting to get anything non-trivial to "just work".

At the scale of a FAANG codebase, AI is currently not that helpful.

Sure, Gemini might have a million token context, but the larger the context th worse the performance.

This is a hard problem to solve, that has had minimal progress in what - 3 years?

If there's a MAJOR breakthrough on output performance wrt context size - then things could change quickly.

The LLMs are currently insanely good at implementing non-novel things in small context windows - mainly because their training sets are big enough that it's essentially a search problem.

But there's a lot more engineering jobs than people think that AREN'T primarily doing this.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#122

Post by [deleted] »

xnx wrote: post #30
sgarland wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Salaries might remain the same, but they'll be expected to produce a lot more.

[deleted]

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#123

Post by krupan »

chasd00 wrote: post #56
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…

https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#124

Post by agentultra »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #97
agentultra wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I’ve read quite a lot about that bloody and terrible part of history.

The Ludddites were workers who lived in an era without any social or state protections for labourers. Capitalists were using child labour to operate the looms because it was cheaper than paying anyone a fair wage. If you didn’t like the conditions you could go work as an indentured servant for the state in the work houses.

Luddites used organized protests in the form of collective violence to force action when they had no other leverage. People were literally shot or jailed for this.

It was a horrible part of history written by the winners. That’s why everyone thinks Luddites were against technology and progress instead of social reforms and responsibility.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#125

Post by orphea »

echelon wrote: post #98
yoz-y wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

  > Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now.
Oh, that is a great analogy. Yes, those pictures are pretty! Until you look closer. Any experienced artist or designer will tell you that they are dogshit and don't have value. Don't look further than at Ubisoft and their Anno 117 game for a proof.

Yep, that's where we are with code now. Pretty - until you look close. Dogshit - if you care to notice details.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#127

Post by Geonode »

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…

Furniture factories are a lot more automated than you're implying with this metaphor.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#128

Post by krupan »

zozbot234 wrote: post #52
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.)

You what code is? A very detailed specification that drives a deterministic machine. Maybe we don't need to keep giving LLMs more details, maybe we could skip the middle man there

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#130

Post by oompydoompy74 »

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…

LLM’s and Agents are merely a tool to be wielded by a competent engineer. A very sophisticated tool, but a tool nonetheless. Maybe it’s because I live in the South East, as far away as I can possibly get from the echo chamber (on purpose), but I don’t see this changing anytime soon.
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