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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

#41

Post by Towaway69 »

nisegami wrote: post #30
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.

Why do we need humans in the loop, what exactly can’t be replaced by an AI in your workflow?

It sounds like having another AI telling the first AI not to “drift” away from the fundamentals would do the trick? Does this activity require some kind of super human abilities that can’t be done by an AI?

What exactly is it that gives satisfaction? Bossing around a junior developer or reviewing code generated by said junior. What's the point of being a “programmer” when one is really just some middle manager defining issues and pushing them out to a factory floor of digital monkeys.

If the satisfaction lies in role playing middle management then I can understand all the hype. Certainly it has nothing to do with programming any longer.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#42

Post by vablings »

nisegami wrote: post #30
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.

With rust a handwritten base sets the standards, and I feel like I have lower usage rolling the first few hundred lines of code and then gradually expanding rather than going in blind.

Also reverse engineering an existing product and using the information to map out behavior and structure is incredibly valuable

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#43

Post by exceptione »

sgbeal wrote: post #39
donkey_brains wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Always use the “refactor” tool in your IDE instead of trying to change every instance of a variable name by hand. That _is_ the refactoring tool in my IDE (emacs). i demonstrated replacing _all_of them at once, not replacing them each by hand. > ... because it’s the right thing to do and doing it without the tool confers no benefit and is prone to error. There was nothing in my post done "without the tool." Shell/f…

  >  i demonstrated replacing _all_of them at once, not replacing them each by hand.
Not really, that is search and replace. IDE's do typesafe refactoring. If you change the Find method in class A, you should only change occurences of x.foo(), where x has type A. You shouldn't accidentally change all B.find()'s.

That is my advice for everyone completing their first Python tutorial: learn a typed language next if you aspire to do serious work. It also saves you writing many manual tests that you had to make otherwise, as the compiler makes that superfluous. Plus your IDE becomes a superpower.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#44

Post by trencedamp »

donkey_brains wrote: post #21
sfn42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I normally would use find replace in vscode but I either forgot that existed or I was enjoying myself too much

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#45

Post by eudamoniac »

sgbeal wrote: post #38
sfn42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Any half decent IDE will change them automatically for you, no need to chase them down It's long been my experience that that only works with high-level languages (specifically, those with bytecode), not C (especially once symbols are generated from macros). (OTOH, i've not touched an IDE in well more than 10 years.) Also, it's long been my experience that any half-decent IDE is still a pale shadow of Emacs.

> It's long been my experience...i've not touched an IDE in well more than 10 years

It's long been that your experience is outdated. A modern IDE will refactor C code just fine, and emacs is a pale shadow of a proper IDE. I understand you are proud to be using an old tool and doing things "the old fashioned way" but you are just using an objectively worse tool for this thing you're talking about throughout the thread. Find and replace is not the correct way to rename a method or variable for obvious reasons.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#46

Post by eudamoniac »

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 agree and I keep control, but I'm pretty sure AI is not faster than no-AI when I keep control. By the time I know what changes I want and how and instruct it how to do that and it thinks and I review the output, I could have written it.

Re: I'm going back to coding by hand

#50

Post by trencedamp »

dunefox wrote: post #27
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' \{} \;

Not using an IDE in 2026?

I actually use vscode but I've not used find replace for months so I forgot how
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