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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

#201

Post by rf15 »

wazHFsRy wrote: post #85
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)

For me, it feels good if I get it right. But unfortunately, there are many times, even with plan mode and everything specced, where after a few hours of chipping away and refactoring the problem by the agent, I realised that I can throw the whole thing away and do over. Then it feels horrible. It feels especially horrible because it feels like you have done nothing for that time and learned nothing.

If you succeed you will have also learned nothing, but would be blissfully unaware of it. (that was my reason to quit AI coding)

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#202

Post by ryan_n »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #41
ryan_n wrote: post #22

I said something similar in a different thread but the joy of actually physically writing code is the main reason why I became a software developer. I think there is some beauty to writing code. I enjoy typing the syntax, the interaction with my IDE, debugging by hand (and brain) rather than LLM, even if it's less efficient. I still use AI, but I do find it terribly sad that this type of more "manual" programming see…

I also enjoy walking more than driving, but if I had to travel 50 miles every day for my job, I would never dream of going on foot. Same goes for AI for me. If I can finish a project in half the time or less, I still feel enough accomplishment and on top of that I will use the gained free time for self actualisation. I like my job and I love coding and solving challenging problems, but I also love tons of other stuff…

I don’t really understand your point about AI freeing up your time to do other stuff at your job. Does your employer let you work less hours since you’re finishing projects sooner? Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’d rather be coding than doing the other parts of my job. But maybe I’m misunderstanding why you were trying to say?

I also would rather a project take longer and struggle through it without using AI as I find joy in the process. But as I said in my original post I understand that type of work appears to be coming to an end.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#203

Post by tux1968 »

runarberg wrote: post #199
tux1968 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is j…

So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1. I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.

I think the distinction without a difference is a tool being deterministic or not. Fundamentally, its nature doesn't matter, if in actual practice it outperforms everything else.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#204

Post by queenkjuul »

davewritescode wrote: post #114
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 never run a team of software engineers as a lead? Agentic coding comes naturally to a lot of people because that's PRECISELY what you do when you're leading a team, herding multiple brains to point them in the same direction so when you combine all their work it becomes something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. Lots of the complains about agents sound identical to things I've heard and even said…

People say this about juniors but I've never seen a junior make some of the bone headed mistakes AI loves to make. Either I'm very lucky or other people have really stupid juniors on their teams lol.

Regardless, personally, there's no comparison between an LLM and a junior; always rather work with a junior.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#205

Post by pdimitar »

askonomm wrote: post #193

Seems like the author has a case of all or nothing. The real power in agentic programming, to me, is not in extremes, but in that you are still actively present. You don't give it world-size things to do, but byte-sized, and you constantly steer it. It's to be detailed enough to produce quality, and to be aware of everything it produces, but not so detailed that it makes sense to just write the code yourself. It's a…

I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment:

> What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?

The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!".

My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and difficult to reproduce bugs. And fixed 6-7 flaky tests and our CI has been 100% green ever since.

Being a skilled operator is an actual billable skill IMO. And that will continue to be the case for a while unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.

I've personally witnessed Opus do world-class detective work. I even left it unattended and it churned away on a problem for almost 5h. But I spent an entire hour before that carefully telling it its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others.

In that ~5h session Opus fixed another extremely annoying bug and found mistakes in tests and corrected them after correcting the production code first and making new tests.

Opus can be scary good but you must not handwave anything away.

I found love for being an architect ever since I started using the newest generation [of scarily smart-looking] LLMs.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#206

Post by KronisLV »

I like writing code that I don't have time pressure around, as well as the kind where I can afford to fail and use that as a learning experience. Especially the code that I can structure myself.

I sometimes dread writing code that's in a state of bad disrepair or is overly complex, think a lot of the "enterprise" code out there - it got so bad that I more or less quit a job over it, though never really stated that publicly, alongside my mind going dark places when you have pressure to succeed but the circumstances are stacked against you.

For a while I had a few Markdown files that went into detail exactly why I hated it, in addition to also being able to point my finger at a few people responsible for it. I tried approaching it professionally, but it never changed and the suggestions and complaints largely fell on deaf ears. Obviously I've learnt that while you can try to provide suggestions, some people and circumstances will never change, often it's about culture fit.

But yeah, outsource all of that to AI, don't even look back. Your sanity is worth more than that.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#207

Post by coldtea »

>Yes, coding is not software engineering

It absolutely is.

>Even if I generate a 1,000 line PR in 30 minutes I still need to understand and review it. Since I am responsible for the code I ship, this makes me the bottleneck.

You don't ship it, the AI does. You're just the middleman, a middleman they can eventually remove altogether.

>Now, I would be lying if I said I didn’t use LLMs to generate code. I still use Claude, but I do so in a more controlled manner.

"I can quit if I want"

>Manually giving claude the context forces me to be familiar with the codebase myself, rather than tell it to just “cook”. It turns code generation from a passive action to a deliberate thoughtful action. It also keeps my brain engaged and active, which means I can still enter the flow state. I have found this to be the best of both worlds and a way to preserve my happiness at work.

And then soon the boss demands more output, like the guys who left it all to Claude and even run 5x in parallel give.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#208

Post by FeteCommuniste »

panzi wrote: post #83
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…

If I have to become a factory worker I'm going to look for another job.

On the assembly line:

"What did you used to do?"

"Programming. You?"

"I was a lawyer."

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#209

Post by throw7272855 »

Coding with AI falls in one of three categories:

1. The thing to be written is available online. AI is a search engine to find it, maybe also translate it to the language of choice.

2. The thing (system or component or function) is genuinely new. The spec has to be very precise and the AI is just doing the typing. This is, at best working around syntax issues, such as some hard-to-remember particular SQL syntax or something like that. The languages should be better.

3. It‘s neither new nor available online but a lot to type out and modify. The AI does all the boilerplate. This is a failure of the frameworks and languages to require so much boilerplate.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#210

Post by onehair »

lokar wrote: post #172
freeopinion wrote: post #59

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 s…

I worry that means the bad code / schema / design never gets improved. I've spent a lot of my career cleaning up stuff like that, I guess with AI we just stop caring?

I wonder just what goes into someone's mind, when they do not care about who in the future is gonna have to maintain what they've crafted. Nor care about the experience of the user. Nor even feel accountable when they haven't done their due diligence to do things right.
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