I'm a big advocate for AI, including GenAI. But I still spend a fair amount of time coding by hand, or "by hand + Copilot completions enabled". And yes, I will use spec driven development with SpecKit + OpenCode, or just straight up "vibe code" on occasion but so far I am unwilling to abdicate my responsibility to understand code and abandon the knowledge of how to write it. Heck, I even bought a couple of new LISP and Java books lately to bone up on various corners of those respectively. And I got a couple of Forth books before that. Not planning to stop coding completely for a while, if ever.
I’m spending months coding the old way
121–130 of 387 posts
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I’m as old timer as old timer can get - started programming as a hobby in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language. But just today a bug was reported by a customer (we are still in testing not a production bug). I implemented this project myself from an empty git repo and an empty AWS account including 3 weeks of pre implementation discovery. I reproduced the issue and through the problem at C…
Did you miss this part? But he was doing this for education, not for work. That's why he should spend 6 hours on it, and not give up and run to the gym. That's like saying "I shouldn't spend an hour at the gym this week, lifting weights is hard and I want to watch TV. I'll just get my forklift to lift the weights for me!"
With his experience, I seriously doubt that he is trying to compete in the job market based on his ability to “codez real gud”. At his (and my) experience level he is more than likely going to get his next job based on a higher level of “scope” and “impact” (yes I’m using BigTech promo docs BS).
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#123I'll bet we see more and more of this in the future. As developer skills atrophy due to over-reliance on LLMs, we'll have to keep our skills sharp somehow. What better way than a sabbatical?
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn't someone consult some kind of external resource for help, after struggling with a specific coding problem for 20 minutes? Why is 6 hours the right amount of time to timebox this to?
20 minutes is not enough time to drive you into a state of desperation, where you may be forced to try something novel which will expand your mind and future capabilities in unknown and unexpected ways. You might be driven to contact another human being, for example.
I was typing up a long and somewhat boring story.
So, the short of it is that this is a great insightful comment that I can back up with my own experience in making a game from scratch over the last 4+ years.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007. If we assume that there are 5…
LOL. If you look at their comment history, they sure are typing a lot of characters for their wrists.
I find it much more valuable to exchange ideas with humans than type every curl bracket and common boilerplate pattern and debug commit myself.
That said, I am also actively experimenting with VTT solutions which are getting quite good.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#126I'm a big advocate for AI, including GenAI. But I still spend a fair amount of time coding by hand, or "by hand + Copilot completions enabled". And yes, I will use spec driven development with SpecKit + OpenCode, or just straight up "vibe code" on occasion but so far I am unwilling to abdicate my responsibility to understand code and abandon the knowledge of how to write it. Heck, I even bought a couple of new LISP a…
My responsibility is to make sure my code meets functional and non functional requirements. It’s to understand the *behavior*. My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that.
Someone thought I was naive when I said my vibe coded internal web admin site met the security requirements without looking at a line of code.
I knew that because the requirements were that anyone who had access to the site could do anything on the site and the site was secured with Amazon Cognito credentials and the Lambda that served it had a least privileged role attached.
If either of those invariants were broken, Claude has found a major AWS vulnerability.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL. If you look at their comment history, they sure are typing a lot of characters for their wrists.
I find it much more valuable to exchange ideas with humans than type every curl bracket and common boilerplate pattern and debug commit myself. That said, I am also actively experimenting with VTT solutions which are getting quite good.
Most of the commentators here are bots these days anyways.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#128> We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat I saw this quote when looking at the Recurse Center website. How does one usually go about something like this if they work full time? Does this mainly target those who are just entering the industry or between jobs? I know the article is mostly about what the author built at t…
Yes mostly in between jobs: https://www.recurse.com/who
Unless you can swing a six week sabbatical and return to your current job
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 mac…
Imagine if Math calculators were just subtly wrong some percentage of the time for use cases that people use dozens or hundreds of times a day. If you could punch in the same math formula 100 times and get more than 1 answer on a calculator, most people wouldn't trust those for serious work. They probably wouldn't think that the calculator makes them faster either
If calculators did work that way, I'm afraid that people would nevertheless take them up because "it saves so much time", and would develop fancy heuristics to plausibility-test for errors.
Re: I’m spending months coding the old way
#130I 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…
> LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-( > I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. You wrote so much code as to wear out your carpal tunner? Are you sure it isn't the documentation and the online chatter with your peers? :-( ... anyway, I know it's corny to say, but - you should h…
> If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-(
Local models are quite good now, and can jump right in to projects I coded by hand, and add new features to them in my voice and style exactly the way I would have, and with more tests than I probably would have had time to write by hand.
Three months ago I thought this was not possible, but local models are getting shockingly good now. Even the best rust programmers I know look at output now and go "well, shit, that is how I would have written it too"
That is a hard thing to admit, but at some point one must accept reality.
> anyway, I know it's corny to say, but - you should have, and shoudl now, improve the ergonomics of your setup. Play with things like the depth of your keyboard on your desk, the height of the chair and the desk, with/without chair handrests, keyboard angle, etc.
I already type with colemak on a split keyboard with each half separated and tented 45 degrees on a saddle stool, with sit/stand desk I alternate. I have read all the research and applied all of it that I can. Without having done all that I probably would have had to change careers.
> "from scratch" can mean any number of things.
As far as I know I was the first person alive to deterministically build linux from 180 bytes of machine code, up to tinycc, to gcc, to a complete llvm native linux distribution.
When I say from scratch, I mean from scratch. Also, all of this before AI without any help from AI, but I sure do appreciate it to help with package maintenance and debugging while I am sleeping.