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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

#221

Post by lokar »

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…

I often find myself in the role of the old guy advising a team to slow down a bit, and invest in doing things better now.

I generally frame this as: Are you optimizing for where you will be in 6 months, or 2 years?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#222

Post by wtetzner »

redox99 wrote: post #166
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…

If you can't deliver features faster with AI assistance then you're either using it wrong or working on very specialized software that AI can't handle yet .

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#223

Post by kryptiskt »

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 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.

Bullshit. The value in software isn't in the number of lines churned out, but in the usefulness of the resulting artifact. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars, the cost to develop it is completely trivial in comparison. The idea that you can't take the time to handcraft software because it's too expensive is pernicious and risks lowering quality standards even further.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#224

Post by tablatom »

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 exactly what I’m doing expressed much more succinctly than I could have done myself. Thanks!

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#225

Post by zemvpferreira »

agentultra wrote: post #124
zemvpferreira wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organi…

In that case I really don't understand how you conclude there's any difference between being on the bottom or the top of the tool. The bare reality is the same: Skilled labourers will be replaced by automation. Woodworking tools (and looms) replaced skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements (such as children), and AI will absolutely replace skilled labourers with less-skilled replacements as well. I ask sincerely, I truly don't understand how this isn't a distinction without a difference. Have you spent time inside a modern furniture factory? Have you seen how few people it takes to make tens of tons of product?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#226

Post by wtetzner »

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…

Yeah, it's addictive in a way similar to scrolling social media shorts or playing a slot machine.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#227

Post by queenkjuul »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #189
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly my experience. Every single time I get an LLM to write some code for me, it saves me no time because I have to review it carefully to make sure there are no mistakes. LLMs still, even after work has been done, completely make up methods and syntax that doesn't exist. They still get logic wrong or miss requirements. Right now the only way to save time with LLMs is to trust the output and not review it.…

Stuff that works ok for me: - documentation for well-known frameworks and libs, "how do I do [x] in [z]?" questions - port small code chunks from one language to another - port configuration from one software to another (example: I got this Apache config, make me the equivalent in NGinX) Which is already pretty cool if you don't think about the massive amount of energy spent for this, but definitely not the "10x" pro…

Pretty much exactly this for me, except i can coax it into writing decent unit tests (really gotta be diligent though, it loves mocking out the things it's testing lol) and for CI stuff (mostly because I despise Actions YAML and rather let it do it). But i do get decent results in both areas on a regular basis.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#228

Post by adamredwoods »

pawelwentpawel wrote: post #186
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 like programming by hand too. Like many of us here, I've been doing this for decades. I'm still proud of the work I produced and the effort I put in. For me it's a highly rewarding and enjoyable activity, just like studying mathematics. Nevertheless, the main motivator for me has been always the final outcome - a product or tool that other people use. Using AI helps me to move much faster and frees up a lot of time…

>> For me it's a highly rewarding and enjoyable activity, just like studying mathematics. Nevertheless, the main motivator for me has been always the final outcome

There are two attitudes stemming from the LLM coding movement, those who enjoyed the craft of coding MORE, and those who enjoy seeing the final output MORE.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#229

Post by redox99 »

wtetzner wrote: post #222
redox99 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't deliver features faster with AI assistance then you're either using it wrong or working on very specialized software that AI can't handle yet .

I haven't seen any evidence yet that using AI is improving developer performance, just a bunch of people who "feel" like it does.

I've built a SaaS (with paying customers) in a month that would have taken me easily 6 months to build with this level of quality and features. AI wrote I'd say 99.9% of code. Without AI I wouldn't even have done this because it would have been too large of a task.

In addition, for my old product which is 5+ years old, AI now writes 95%+ of code for me. Now the programming itself takes a small percentage of my time, freeing me time for other tasks.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#230

Post by finaard »

queenkjuul wrote: post #204
davewritescode wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've wrote this a few times, but LLM interactions often remind me of my days at Nokia - a lot of the interactions are exactly like what I remember with some of their cheap subcons there.

I even have exactly the same discussion after it messed up, like "My code is working, ignore that failing test, that was always broking, and I definitey didn't break it just now".

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