I’m spending months coding the old way • Hacker News Board

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#21

Post by LeCompteSftware » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems:

> There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand!

Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling.

I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#22

Post by teruakohatu » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

That is exactly been the situation for years. Once graduated accountants are not doing maths. They are using software (Exel, Xero etc.). They do need to know some basic formulas eg. NPV.

What they need to know is the law, current business practices etc.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#23

Post by rafaelmn » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #18

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast.

I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#24

Post by hallway_monitor » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #18

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#25

Post by the_gipsy » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #3

You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.

If they're so great, then we will end up somewhere where it's easy to pick up.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#26

Post by lrvick » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #18

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

The same way I learned 25 years ago still works today. Volunteer on open source projects.

Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded).

Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#27

Post by adamddev1 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #17

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and jus…

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#28

Post by sho_hn » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he…

Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#29

Post by sho_hn » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #26

sho_hn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

The same way I learned 25 years ago still works today. Volunteer on open source projects. Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded). Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around.

Can't disagree, that's how I did it too :-)

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#30

Post by lrvick » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #23

sho_hn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.

Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.

But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing.

We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption, deterministic builds, full source bootstrapping, secure enclaves, end to end encryption, remote attestation, hardware security auth, or proper code review.

Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help because the LLMs were trained to keep doing things the old way unless we direct them to do otherwise from our own base of experience on cutting edge security research no models are trained on sufficiently.