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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

#151

Post by 20k »

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand

Coincidentally I've been working on a project for about 7 months now: its a 3d MMO. Currently its playable, and people are having fun with it - it has decent (but needs work) graphics, and you can cram a few hundred people into the server easily currently. The architecture is pretty nice, and its easy to extend and add features onto. Overall, I'm very happy with the progress, and its on track to launch after probably a years worth of development

In 7 months vibe coding, OP failed to produce a basic TUI. Maybe the feature velocity feels high, but this seems unbelievably slow for building a basic piece of UI like this - this is the kind of thing you could knock out in a few weeks by hand. There are tonnes of TUI libraries that are high quality at this point, and all you need to do is populate some tables with whatever data you're looking for. Its surprising that its taking so long

There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice. This seems to be backed up by the available productivity data, where AI users feel faster but produce less

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

#152

Post by byzantinegene »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #123
snowe2010 wrote: post #34

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it d…

Yes, I think there's 2 kinds of developer. Those who think the code is the hard part, and those that don't. The developers that thing coding is hard are the ones that absolutely love AI coding. It's changed their world because things they used to find hard are now easy. Those that think coding is easy don't have such an easy time because coding to them is all about the abstractions, the maintainability and extensibil…

this pretty much sums up what i feel about AI currently. It made my life significantly easier for most tasks I already breeze through, yet tasks I used to struggle with are still the equally difficult

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

#153

Post by simon84 »

Personally, i've taken a serious step back from 'unsupervised' vibe-coding. When the codebase is clean and you want some additional fix or small feature, Claude is quite good at mimicking your style and does a pretty good job.

When asking for a new major feature, despite hard guidelines and context (that eat half your context window), then it quickly ships bloat. The foundations are not very well organized and this is where you acknowledge it is all about random-prediction of the next word-thing.

Overall, i've wasted more time reviewing the PR and trying to steer it properly than I expected. So multi-layer agent vibe coding is no longer the way to go *for me*. Maybe with unlimited tokens and a better prompt, to be investigated...

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

#154

Post by kortilla »

dathanb82 wrote: post #82
baddash wrote: post #76

I've set a few rules for working with coding agents: 1. If I use a coding agent to generate code, it should be something I am absolutely confident I can code correctly myself given the time (gun to my head test). 2. If it isn't, I can't move on until I completely understand what it is that has been generated, such that I would be able to recreate it myself. 3. I can create debt (I believe this is being called Cogniti…

I’ve also heard it being called “comprehension debt,” which I like a little more because I think it’s more precise: the specific debt being accrued is exactly a lack of comprehension of the code.

“You can outsource your thinking, but not your understanding.”

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #123
snowe2010 wrote: post #34

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it d…

Yes, I think there's 2 kinds of developer. Those who think the code is the hard part, and those that don't. The developers that thing coding is hard are the ones that absolutely love AI coding. It's changed their world because things they used to find hard are now easy. Those that think coding is easy don't have such an easy time because coding to them is all about the abstractions, the maintainability and extensibil…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by seer »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #123
snowe2010 wrote: post #34

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it d…

Yes, I think there's 2 kinds of developer. Those who think the code is the hard part, and those that don't. The developers that thing coding is hard are the ones that absolutely love AI coding. It's changed their world because things they used to find hard are now easy. Those that think coding is easy don't have such an easy time because coding to them is all about the abstractions, the maintainability and extensibil…

But isn’t AI doing the same thing to project management as to coding?

PMs can now cross reference and organize tickets with just a few keystrokes. Organisational knowledge, business knowledge, design systems and patterns, etc all of it is encoded in LLM consumable artefacts. For PMs it is the same switch - instead of having to do it by hand you direct lower level employees to handle the details and inconsistencies and you just do vibe and vision.

When all of the pieces successfully connect and execute reliably, what is left for humans to do? Just direct and consume?

And AI companies with their huge swaths of data are soon gonna be in the situation of being able to do the directing themselves

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

#157

Post by zem »

I don't bother trying to give the LLM a set of dos and don'ts for how to write the code, that becomes a frustrating game of whack-a-mole. I find it a lot more efficient to have it write some code, look it over, and if I'm not happy with some of the decisions give it specific instructions for how to fix that one part. as a bonus I end up reinforcing my knowledge of the code base in the process.

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

#158

Post by pjmlp »

0xpgm wrote: post #118
pjmlp wrote: post #94

I am still mostly coding by hand, other than meeting the KPIs of AI use at the company, required trainings, use of agents and whatever. Eventually like every hype wave the dust will settle, and lets see where we stand. By now all the AI companies have consumed all human knowledge so they either learn to actually think for themselves, or that is it. Either way, that won't change the ongoing layoffs while trying to pur…

> Either way, that won't change the ongoing layoffs while trying to pursue the AI dream from management point of view. I think most companies doing layoffs are bloated to begin with, AI is just the scapegoat to do the layoffs.

I am aware of layoffs that are really caused by AI.

Translation and asset generation teams for enterprise CMS, whose role has now been taken by AI.

Likewise traditional backend development, that was already reduced via SaaS products, serverless, iPaaS low code/no code tooling, that now is further reduced via agents workflow tooling, doing orchestration via tools (serverless endpoints).

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

#159

Post by thot_experiment »

20k wrote: post #151

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand Coincidentally I've been working on a project for about 7 months now: its a 3d MMO. Currently its playable, and people are having fun with it - it has decent (but needs work) graphics, and you can cram a few hundred people into the server easily currently. The architecture is p…

It's more complex than that, I think the reality is that there's a lot of code that's just not that deep bro. I have some purely personal projects that have components that I don't understand anymore, I wrote that shit by hand, they still work but I haven't touched that shit in years. There's a lot of code that AI can write that's like that that helps me, the stuff I would forget about even if I wrote it by hand. I think you have to have discipline in it's use, it's a tool like any other.

AI, and especially agentic AI can make you lose situational awareness over a codebase and when you're doing deep work that SUUUUCKS, but it's not useless, you just have to play to it's strengths. Though my favorite hill to die on is telling people not to underestimate it's value as autocomplete. Turns out 40 gigabytes of autocomplete makes for a fucking amazing autocomplete. Try it with llama.vim + qwen coder 30b, it feels like the editor is reading your mind sometimes and the latency is so low.

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

#160

Post by imtringued »

brabel wrote: post #103
baddash wrote: post #76

I've set a few rules for working with coding agents: 1. If I use a coding agent to generate code, it should be something I am absolutely confident I can code correctly myself given the time (gun to my head test). 2. If it isn't, I can't move on until I completely understand what it is that has been generated, such that I would be able to recreate it myself. 3. I can create debt (I believe this is being called Cogniti…

I was trying to follow similar rules, until one day I had to solve a hard mathematical problem. Claude is a phd level mathematician, I am not. I, however, know exactly the properties of the desired solution and how to test it’s correct. So I decided to keep Claude’s solution over my basic, naive one. I mentioned that in the pull request and everyone agreed that was the right call. Would you open exceptions like that…

You do realize you can ask Claude about the things you don't understand?

"PhD level" just means you finished a bachelor and masters degree and are now doing a bit of original research as an employed research assistant.

Claude isn't "PhD level" anything. This shows a complete lack of understanding here. Claude has read every single text book in existence, so it can surface knowledge locked away in book chapters that people haven't read in years (nobody really reads those dense books on niche topics from start to finish).

Since Claude has infinite patience, you can just keep asking until you get it.

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