I'm going back to writing code by hand • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by NichoPaolucci » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:13 AM UTC

whattheheckheck wrote: post #31

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about codebases being "incomprehensible", it's not always hyperbole. Sometimes the architecture literally cannot be broken up or understood.

I find that really hard to believe. It's not like curing cancer

While I mostly agree - science is built up on truths. Code has a large amount of creativity and freedom built into the decisions, some codebases will be documented, follow rigorous training, and design decisions. Others will just be an absolute legacy mess of 20 years of odd decisions made by people who may have not known what they were doing. Like an art piece that you don’t really “understand”.

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

#42

Post by green_wheel » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #30

Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly? Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have…

Nondeterministic natural language compilers

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

#43

Post by eggplantemoji69 » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:16 AM UTC

TLDR ai wrote tech debt slop because I vibed for 7 months, now I am taking a hybrid approach of defining strict constraints before vibing…

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

#44

Post by tres » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

dropbox_miner wrote: post #14

erelong wrote: post #7

Can't you just ask AI to break up large files into smaller ones and also explain how the code works so you can understand it, instead of start over from scratch?

That was actually the first thing I tried. It did a good jov at explaining the code base mess and the architecture. Then I ran 3-4 refactor attempts. Each one broke things in ways that were harder to debug than the original mess. The god object had so many implicit dependencies that pulling one thread unraveled something else. And each attempt burned through my daily Claude usage limit before the refactor was stable.…

What's your test coverage like?

Not sure why good coverage wouldn't mitigate risk in a refactor...

My mantra whenever I'm working with AI is that I want it to know what "point b" looks like and be able to tell by itself whether it's gotten there...

If you have a working implementation, it sounds like you have a basis for automated tests to be written... once you have that (assuming that the tests are written to test the interface rather than the implementation), then it should be fairly direct to have an agent extract and decompose...

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

#45

Post by d_silin » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

It absolutely looks like AI psychosis.

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

#46

Post by amelius » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:30 AM UTC

So how are people writing the specifications for AI?

Do they write empty functions and let AI fill them in?

Or do they use some kind of specification language?

Are people designing those languages?

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

#47

Post by sakesun » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:41 AM UTC

A coder typing in code is not solely to generate outcome. It's part of ongoing thinking process. Without this ongoing process, we have no material to keep iterating forward.

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

#48

Post by scuff3d » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:48 AM UTC

I feel like this article was circling a point it never actually got to. All the advice in here (except controlling scope creep) is specific to a TUI with an elm like architecture.

But here's the thing, you almost never know what the architecture is up front. If you do you probably aren't the one writing the actual code anymore. Writing the code, with or without an AI is part of the design process. For most people it isn't until they've tried several times, fucked it up a bunch, and refactored or rewrote even more that you actually know what the architecture needs to be.

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

#49

Post by staplers » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:50 AM UTC

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…

  You need to be checking every thing it does.

This is what seems to be lost on so many. As someone with relatively little code experience, I find myself learning more than ever by checking the results and what went right/wrong.

This is also why I don't see it getting better anytime soon. So many people ask me "how do you get your claude to have such good output?" and the answer is always "I paid attention and spotted problems and asked claude to fix them." And it's literally that simple but I can see their eyes already glazing over.

Just as google made finding information easier, it didn't fix the human element of deciphering quality information from poor information.

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

#50

Post by royal__ » Mon, May 11, 2026, 3:52 AM UTC

The title is just flat out wrong. The author isn't going back to writing code by hand, they're plopping some new stuff into their CLAUDE.md to "fix" the issues they see AI is having.