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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

#61

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

cpncrunch wrote: post #29
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could be wrong in some subtle way I'm not seeing, but I believe the model we're working in avoids the downsides. I actually think my review bar is slightly higher now, because I don't feel as much pressure to compromise my standards when I know Claude is capable of writing the code I want.

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

#64

Post by jesse_dot_id »

LLMs assist those of us who were apt to take blocks of code from StackOverflow, or wherever, to solve problems quickly and avoid as much of the aggravating and slow toil of trial and error as possible.

That trial and error process is still happening with a LLM, but much faster, and with instantaneous cross-references to various forms of documentation that I would be looking up myself otherwise. It produces code of a quality that is dependent on the engineer knowing what they want in the first place and prompting for it and refining its output correctly.

It's the exact same process of sculpting code that the majority of the industry was doing "by hand" prior to the release of LLMs, but faster, and the harnesses are only getting better. To "vibe code" is to prompt vaguely and ignore the quality of the output. You're coming to a forum full of professionals and essentially telling us that you're getting really frustrated with your Scratch project.

I don't know if you're trying to lead a charge or whatever but good luck with that. As a senior SWE, it is clear to me that this is the new paradigm until something better than LLMs comes along. My workflows and efficiency have been vastly improved. I will admit that I have never really been a "I made a SMTP server in 3k of Rust" kind of guy, though.

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

#68

Post by RuoqiJin »

This is Claude's problem. Compared to GPT-5.5, Claude Code prefers to take shortcuts. I've tested having codexapp GPT-5.5 and Claude Code opus4.7 do the same thing - if following GPT-5.5's requirements, Claude Code's execution time for a task would stretch from 5 minutes to 40 minutes. To solve macro architecture problems, I use Lisp to write the entire program's framework. Lisp replaces architecture documents, because I believe it has high semantic density, syntax restrictions, and checkers for assistance. This way, at least I didn't have to rework anything anymore. I used this method to refactor my 20+ projects
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