Good luck finding a job. All the decision making business people I know see only two types of “technical people”.
The ones who are “AI pilled” and the contagious lepers.
I'm going back to writing code by hand
161–170 of 656 posts
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#162I feel like I’m watching developers speed run project and product management learnings. We’ve moved to seeing that specs are useful and that having someone write lots of wrong code doesn’t make the project move faster (lots of times devs get annoyed at meetings and discussions because it hinders the code writing, but often those are there to stop everyone writing more of the wrong thing ) We’ve seen people find out t…
So right. All these guys have never been managers. Do you think humans don't write things that break? Or that teams sometimes take a wrong path and burn a week of work? Or months? Well now you can experience all of that in 30 minutes of vibecoding. As a former tech product manager, it feels EXACTLY the same.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#163I'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…
This is great until the "gun to your head" is your skip-level manager demanding that a feature be implemented by the end of the week, and they know you can just "generate it with AI" so that timeline is actually realistic now whereas two years ago it would have required careful planning, testing, and execution.
Well, that's nice.
Your manager is unknowingly helping you create a form of job security for yourself, with all the technical debt and bugs being accumulated.
He might not understand it, and it might not be the type of work you want to do, but someone is going to have to fix those issues. And the longer they wait, the bigger the task gets.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#164> 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…
I agree with what you're saying, but I think we do have a problem right now with definitions where there's a lot of people basically getting supercharged tab completions or running a chatbot or two in a parallel pane, but still clearly reviewing everything; and on the other side of things is freaking Steve Yegge pitching a whole new editor that lets you orchestrate a dozen or more agents all vibing away on code you'r…
That blog post is surreal. It's like cryptocurrencies and the whole web3 nonsense. Cryptocurrencies basically don't work, so there have been a hundred aimless attempts at fixing self inflicted problems caused by deficiencies of cryptocurrencies with no actual goal that has any impact on the real world.
It's the same thing here. AI has dropped the cost of software development, so developers are now fooling themselves into producing low or zero value software. Since the value of the software is zero or near zero, it doesn't really matter whether you get it right or not. This freedom from external constraints lets you crank up development velocity, which makes you feel super productive, while effectively accomplishing less than if you had to actually pay a meaningful cost to develop something.
Like, what is the purpose of Gas Town? It looks to me like the purpose of Gas Town is to build Gas Town.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#165That’s the same story I had.
The swindle goes like this, AI on a good codebase can build a lot of features, you think it’s faster it even seems safer and more accurate on times, especially in domains you don’t know everything about.
This goes in for a while whilst the codebase gets bigger and exploration takes longer and failure rate increases. You don’t want it to be true and try harder so you only stop after it practically became impossible to make any changes.
You look at the code again and there is so much code spaghetti is an understatement it’s the Chinese wall.
You start working…, and you realize what was going on
I deleted 75,000 of 140,000 lines of code and I honestly feel like the 3 months I went hard into agentic coding I wasted and I failed my users by building useless features increasing bugs, losing the mental model of my code and not finding the problems I didn’t know about the kind of hard decisions you only see when you in the code, the stuff that wanders in your mind for days
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#166Title says > back to writing code by hand But what they are doing is > doing the __design work__ myself, by hand, before any code gets written. So... Claude still is generating the code I guess? And seriously, I can't understand that they thought their vibe coded project works fine and even bought a domain for the project without ever looking at source code it generated, FOR 7 MONTHS??
In short, it is simply a click-bait title. And the goal of the article is to draw attention to their project.
It's the same thing every time.
> Claude (c) by Anthropic (R) is the best thing since sliced bread and I'm Lovin' It(tm)! Here's a breakdown of you too can live a code free life for 10 easy payments of $99.99 a month if you subscribe now!
> Step one in your journey to code free life: code the whole damn project and put it together yourself
It's so much fluff and baloney and every single article is identical. And every single one is just over the top praise of Claude that doesn't come off as remotely authentic. There's always mentions of Claude "one shotting"(tm) something.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of what I figured, sadly. I haven't experienced it personally yet since I got let go from my last job about 14 months ago, but it makes so much sense given how management is so willing to sacrifice quality for speed.
Another frustrating thing that has emerged from this is where managers “vibe code” half-baked ideas for a couple of hours and then hand it off as if they’ve meaningfully contributed to the implementation. Suddenly you’re expected to reverse engineer incoherent prompts, inconsistent code, and random abstractions that nobody fully understands. In their mind they’ve already done the “architectural heavy lifting” and acc…
Vouching for this comment because my friend confided in me a week ago that her manager also does this and is like “oh yeah, here’s 80% done, you just do the rest so we can ship it” when a large part of it is slop that needs to be rewritten, due to not enough guidance and pushback during generation.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#168I 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…
> 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 metric highly depends on who uses the AI to do what, where strong emphasis is on "who" and "what".
In my line of work (software developer) the biggest time sinks are meetings where people need to align proposed solutions with the expectations of stakeholders. From that aspect AI won't help much, or at all, so measuring the difference of man hours spent from solution proposal to when it ends up in the test loops with and without AI would yield... very disappointing results.
But for troubleshooting and fixing bugs, or actually implementing solutions once they have been approved? For me, I'm at least 10x'ing myself compared to before I was using AI. Not only in pure time, but also in my ability to reason around observed behaviors and investigating what those observations mean when troubleshooting.
But I also work with people who simply cannot make the AI produce valuable (correct) results. I think if you know exactly what you want and how you want it, AI is a great help. You just tell it to do what you would have done anyway, and it does it quicker than you could. But if you don't know exactly what you want, AI will be outright harmful to your progress.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#169I feel like I’m watching developers speed run project and product management learnings. We’ve moved to seeing that specs are useful and that having someone write lots of wrong code doesn’t make the project move faster (lots of times devs get annoyed at meetings and discussions because it hinders the code writing, but often those are there to stop everyone writing more of the wrong thing ) We’ve seen people find out t…
So right. All these guys have never been managers. Do you think humans don't write things that break? Or that teams sometimes take a wrong path and burn a week of work? Or months? Well now you can experience all of that in 30 minutes of vibecoding. As a former tech product manager, it feels EXACTLY the same.
Except it isn't the same because the cost is different, which allows discovery that we couldn't afford previously.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#170I 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…
Seems to be baked into the GPT- produce text- aka to produce language and code is life and purpose. So the whole system is inherently internally biased towards "roll your own everything?" unless spoke too in a "Senior-dev" language, that prevents these repetitions.