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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#141

Post by Terr_ »

scarface_74 wrote: post #126
mindcrime wrote: post #121

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 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…

As written, I do think that's naive. Being sure the person/browser is authorized doesn't mean that the signals you get are actions they intended.

Suppose that in normal use a user can visit a certain URL which triggers a dangerous effect. An attacker could trick the user into performing the action by presenting a link to them titled "click here for free stuff."

There are various ways to protect against that (e.g. CORS, not using GET methods) but backend cloud credential management does not give it to you for free.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#142

Post by wffurr »

apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

>> Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

My first job out of university I was taught how to use a line editor in IBM UniData. It was interesting getting used to writing code that way.

But it was an amazing day when I discovered that the "program table" was just a directory on the server I could mount over FTP and use Notepad++.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#143

Post by Tanoc »

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…

Often times the fastest way to debug is to write it wrong, write it wrong again, find an example where somebody wrote it right, write that wrong in your own file, then figure out what you changed to adapt it that made it go wrong.

If anyone remembers middleschool mathematics this is the coding example of the teacher making you write out the equations in their longest form instead of shortcutting. It's done this way because it shows you your exact train of thought and where you went wrong. That sticks in your head. You understand the problem by understanding yourself. Giving up after twenty minutes instead of stopping, clearing your active cognitive load, and then coming back erases your ability to understand that train of thought.

For a comparison it's like being in first person view in a videogame, and the only thing you have is the ability to look behind you, versus being able to bring up a map that has an overhead view. In first person you're likely to lose where exactly you went to get where you are, while with the overhead view map you can orient your traveled route according to landmarks and distance.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#144

Post by heyalexhsu »

AstroBen wrote: post #45

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).

I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#145

Post by zrobotics »

apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

I took a very similar class 9 years ago, and it was honestly one of the most helpful things I got out of my CS degree. The low level and limited tooling taught me to think before I start writing.

I've had other people look askanse at me, but on greenfield work I tend to start with pen and graph paper. I'm not even writing pseudocode, but diagramming a loose graph with potential functions or classes and arrows interconnecting them. Obviously this can be taken too far, full waterfall planning will be a different exercise in frustration.

I find spending a few hours planning out ahead of time before opening an editor saves me tons of time actually coding. I've never had a project even loosely resemble the paper diagram, but the exercise of thinking through the general structure ahead of time makes me way more productive when it comes time to start writing code. I've tried diagramming and scaffolding in my editor, but then I end up actually writing code instead of big picture diagramming. Writing it on paper where I know I'll have to retype everything anyway removes the distractions of what method to use or what to name a variable.

The few times I've vibe-coded something this was super helpful, since then I can give much more concrete and focused prompts.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#146

Post by losvedir »

scarface_74 wrote: post #126
mindcrime wrote: post #121

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 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…

It wouldn't prevent the admin page from exfiltrating data, though, right? Like, POSTing whatever data is loaded on the page to an arbitrary attacker controlled website.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#147

Post by temporallobe »

The very first few years of my career I spent writing code (mostly Perl) in vi (not even vim) on a SPARC running Solaris. I bought myself the O’Riley Perl Cookbook and that was pretty much my sole guide apart from the few internet forums that were available at the time. Search engines were still primitive, so getting help when you got stuck was far more difficult. But it forced me to deeply learn a lot of things - Perl syntax (we had no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) terminal tools, and especially vi keystrokes. Looking back, there was far less distraction and “noise”, though I admit that could have been the fact that it was the beginning of my career and expectations were lower. I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#148

Post by fouronnes3 »

AstroBen wrote: post #45

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).

I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#149

Post by fouronnes3 »

I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testing.

This would probably require cooperation during model training, but now that I think of it, is there adversarial research on LLM? Can you design text data specifically to mess with LLM training? Like what is the 1MB of text data that if I insert it into the training set harms LLM training performance the most?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#150

Post by bdangubic »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #148
AstroBen wrote: post #45

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).

I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!

if it catches a lot of bugs maybe you’d be better of letting it write it in the first place :)
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