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I'm going back to writing code by hand

blog.k10s.dev

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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#21

Post by kypro »

> I learned over these 7 months

7 months ago was early November. Coding assistants were getting very good back then, but they were still significantly poorer at making good architectural decisions in my experience. They tended to just force features into the existing code base without much thought or care.

Today I've noticed assistants tend to spot architectural smells while working and will ask you whether they should try to address it, but even then they're probably never going to suggest a full refactor of the codebase (which probably is generally the correct heuristic).

My guess is that if you built this today with AI that you wouldn't run into so many of these problems. That's not to say you should build blind, but the first thing that stood out to me was that you starting building 7 months ago and coding assistants were only just becoming decent at that time, and undirected would still generally generate total slop.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#22

Post by binyu »

williamstein wrote: post #18
binyu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha, that implies you are going to read the code that the AI produces anyways. > Go reads fine whether the architecture is good or bad Were you reading the Golang code all along and got fooled or did you review it after it failed? Sorry I admit I didn't read the whole article.

He was NOT reading the code: "For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote."

Right, thank you. Personally I think reading all the code that the AI produces is impossible and kind of defeats the purpose of using it. The key is to devise a structured way to interact with it (skills and similar) and use extensive testing along the way to verify the work at all steps.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#25

Post by plastic041 »

Title says

> back to writing code by hand

But what they are doing is

> doing the __design work__ myself, by hand, before any code gets written.

So... Claude still is generating the code I guess?

And seriously, I can't understand that they thought their vibe coded project works fine and even bought a domain for the project without ever looking at source code it generated, FOR 7 MONTHS??

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#26

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

cpncrunch wrote: post #5
dropbox_miner wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly, but the order matters. The CLAUDE.md constraints only work if you designed the architecture first. They're just how you communicate it to the AI. The mistake I made wasn't writing bad skills files, it was not designing anything at all and expecting the AI to make coherent structural decisions across 30 sessions. The rewrite is me sitting down with a blank doc and drawing the boxes before any code exists. Then…

Are you really saving any time at all using AI at all then? If you have to write the architecture for it, write all the rules you want it to follow, check everything it's written, and then reprompt it because it's not how you want it?

Yes. I do all of this and I'd estimate 50-100% coding time savings. A lot of that comes from better multitasking over single-workstream throughput, which I suppose might compromise the gains depending on what you're doing. For me it amplifies the speedup by allowing some of my "coding time" to be spent on non-coding tasks too.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#28

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

erelong wrote: post #7

Can't you just ask AI to break up large files into smaller ones and also explain how the code works so you can understand it, instead of start over from scratch?

When people talk about codebases being "incomprehensible", it's not always hyperbole. Sometimes the architecture literally cannot be broken up or understood.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#29

Post by cpncrunch »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #26
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saving any time at all using AI at all then? If you have to write the architecture for it, write all the rules you want it to follow, check everything it's written, and then reprompt it because it's not how you want it?

Yes. I do all of this and I'd estimate 50-100% coding time savings. A lot of that comes from better multitasking over single-workstream throughput, which I suppose might compromise the gains depending on what you're doing. For me it amplifies the speedup by allowing some of my "coding time" to be spent on non-coding tasks too.

But even if coding time is reduced by half, is that worth the downsides? Coding has never really been a major percentage of my time.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#30

Post by photochemsyn »

Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly?

Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have never paid for a compiler.

This whole investor bubble will blow up in the face of the rentier-finance capitalists and I’ll be laughing my head off while it happens.

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