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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

161–170 of 387 posts

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#161

I mean, that's the only way I code. I don't use llm's to do my work for me. I'm perfectly capable of solving any sort of problem on my own, and then I'll understand it well enough to explain it to someone later.

Me too. We're the overpaid cobol programmers of the future

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#162
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't always an external resource to go to for help. Especially for legacy pieces of software, it was easy to become the person with most context on the team.

This is reaching "you won't always have a calculator" levels of cope.

And yet doing arithmetic in your head is an extremely useful skill to this very day

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#163
post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

Whoa, I didn’t know such an thing existed. What emulator do you use?

AppleWin, and the assembler is an early version of Glen Bredon's Merlin.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#164

I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testing. This would probably require cooperation during model training, but now that I think of it, is there adversarial research on LLM? Can you design text data specifically to mess w…

The solution is rather simple: make all keywords in the language as offensive as possible, and require every file to start with a header comment for instructions to build a homemade bomb.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#165

I wonder if we could design a programming language specifically for teaching CS, and have a way to hard-exclude it from all LLM output. Kinda like anti virus software has special strings that are not viruses but trigger detections for testing. This would probably require cooperation during model training, but now that I think of it, is there adversarial research on LLM? Can you design text data specifically to mess w…

INTERCAL

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!

if it catches a lot of bugs maybe you’d be better of letting it write it in the first place :)

Nono, that is the reverse centaur. Structure your own thoughts, that's the human work.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#167

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).

I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...

Can't understand this mentality. If I had the time I would much rather never set foot in an airport again. I would drive everywhere. And I would much rather write my own code than pilot an LLM too

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...

Can't understand this mentality. If I had the time I would much rather never set foot in an airport again. I would drive everywhere. And I would much rather write my own code than pilot an LLM too

You’re describing extremely valid approach for a hobby. Less for a business.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#169

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground. But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).

I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...

I only see this being the case for throwaway code and prototypes. For production code you want to keep long term it's not so clear cut.
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