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I'm going back to coding by hand

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#21

Post by donkey_brains »

sfn42 wrote: post #12
sgbeal wrote: post #9

> I changed some variable names and I had to chase down all the places they were referenced, $ find . -name '*.c' -exec perl -i -pe 's/\btheOldName\b/theNewName/g' \{} \;

Any half decent IDE will change them automatically for you, no need to chase them down. Just look at the git diff if you want to see where things changed.

Yeah this is a very very common and fundamental operation in programming. Always use the “refactor” tool in your IDE instead of trying to change every instance of a variable name by hand.

It’s like using a linter: you do it because it’s the right thing to do and doing it without the tool confers no benefit and is prone to error.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#22

Post by donkey_brains »

sfn42 wrote: post #18
sevenseacat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with manual reviewing, most of its changes will look relatively reasonable when approving every chunk... until you come across one that doesn't, and then it'll be a neverending chain of 'wait why tf does it do this ? Why does it work this way ?'

This is not a problem I've had. I know roughly what I want before I ask for it, I make sure the result is roughly what I expected. Some times if I'm not entirely sure what I want I'll ask it to plan the change or suggest some approaches etc then choose the one I prefer. For me it works great. My judgement is that I get things done significantly faster, and generally with comparable or better quality than I would doin…

So do you make the LLM restrict its output to small, individually-reviewable chunks per PR?

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#23

Post by arkensaw »

sfn42 wrote: post #13

It's a common complaint that people lose control of their codebase using LLMs. It always strikes me as odd, because this is a choice you make when you use the tool. You don't have to just give it a task, let it do whatever it wants, then accept the result. You can tell it how to do things. You can read the changes. You can ask it to do things differently. You choose to relinquish all control and then complain that yo…

I don't think anyone chooses to relinquish all control from a project they've worked hard on. It's a slippery slope. You start with allowing it to help out a tiny bit, being in control and understanding the code the LLM writes, and then you become more confident in the results, and you trust it, and you don't read every line, and before long its refactoring an entire file by itself and you're not reading it.

And then you look up one day and you don't recognise the codebase

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#24

Post by arkensaw »

pulkas wrote: post #19

If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed, coding by hand probably makes more sense. At least it keeps your brain engaged. But the right move is to find a way to increase the rate at which you generate ideas and offload the coding almost entirely to AI. Because if you’re not doing that, someone else is. They’ll eventually build something better than your app. And when people stop choosing your…

> If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed

For me, it definitely is. Hell, my idea generation outpaces my ability to delegate it to agents. I can't do all the things I want to do because I don't have enough time in the day to vocalise them all, let alone hand code.

But in my case, I choose to handcode sometimes because I value the certainty of the results more than the speed of development.

It's the choice between a well-engineered application that does a handful of things reliably through a well-tested UI, or a rough-around-the-edges app that does 50 different things passably well, most of the time, with an inconsistent UI and lots of small bugs

People here might question the "lots of small bugs" but I have developed some apps solely with LLMs and despite using test-suites and spec-driven development I still face constant regression and UI bugs creeping in with every revision.

A good example - in React Native, in Android, Claude cannot keep the controls above where the onscreen nav appears, no matter how many times I ask it to. It'll solve it until three iterations later when the issue will return on another screen.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#26

Post by dunefox »

I'm not. I just don't want to implement code for reading files, setting up and population databases, logs, etc. manually anymore. I want to automate boilerplate, the occasional frontend code, etc. and focus on the parts that are interesting for me. This way I can get things done that I wouldn't otherwise.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#28

Post by dunefox »

sevenseacat wrote: post #16
sfn42 wrote: post #13

It's a common complaint that people lose control of their codebase using LLMs. It always strikes me as odd, because this is a choice you make when you use the tool. You don't have to just give it a task, let it do whatever it wants, then accept the result. You can tell it how to do things. You can read the changes. You can ask it to do things differently. You choose to relinquish all control and then complain that yo…

Even with manual reviewing, most of its changes will look relatively reasonable when approving every chunk... until you come across one that doesn't, and then it'll be a neverending chain of 'wait why tf does it do this ? Why does it work this way ?'

Honestly, this is less of a problem with LLMs than with some colleagues I've had.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#29

Post by dosisking »

dunefox wrote: post #26

I'm not. I just don't want to implement code for reading files, setting up and population databases, logs, etc. manually anymore. I want to automate boilerplate, the occasional frontend code, etc. and focus on the parts that are interesting for me. This way I can get things done that I wouldn't otherwise.

I hope I never have to use your software

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#30

Post by nisegami »

aatd86 wrote: post #14

Unfortunately I can't do that. My projects are too big now. In fact, this is how I deal with projects: I build the base manually and then I can iterate with AI faster once the fundamentals are solid. Sometimes the AI tends to forget those fundamentals or tries to change those and add unnecessary stuff on top. If I stay invested in what the AI is doing, I can usually spot it and nudge the AI back to sanity. That is ho…

>I build the base manually and then I can iterate with AI faster once the fundamentals are solid.

I've had tremendous success with this approach as well.

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