I am loving the articles alternating between "software engineering is dead" and "I am going back to coding by hand". I guess we have a difference of opinions here. :-)
I'm going back to writing code by hand
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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, I am past the point of wanting to convince people that AI is useful, if you want to refuse new tools other people find helpful, your loss. (Also I stick to the original definition of "vibe coding = not looking at generated code", "LLM assisted coding = verify generated code", I do both, depending on the task)
So basically your only test is "it compiles" since you have no idea what it's actually testing.
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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
But even if coding time is reduced by half, is that worth the downsides? Coding has never really been a major percentage of my time.
I could be wrong in some subtle way I'm not seeing, but I believe the model we're working in avoids the downsides. I actually think my review bar is slightly higher now, because I don't feel as much pressure to compromise my standards when I know Claude is capable of writing the code I want.
I would say the main downside is not knowing what all your code does, and where to find any particular function.
After the initial coding is complete, will you need to use AI to fix bugs? Presumably that is both slower and more expensive than doing it by hand when you know exactly where to look?
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I have not discovered anything new. I have applied established architecture and engineering practices that I've been following for 15 years to using Claude Code. Domain-Driven Design started with Eric Evan's "blue book" in 2003 and continued with Vaughn Vernon's "red book" a few years later. Event Storming workshops and event sourcing data storage have also emerged as important tools. I am just a practitioner. Eric,…
I encourage skeptics to look at the Sharpee repo at https://github.com/chicagodave/sharpee and specifically docs/context. Every session summary is there going back months.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, basically you need to micro-manage it. Where are your 10x gains now? And is it fun to work like that?
This is actually what I do. I'm extremely picky about the code and force the LLM to rewrite it 1000x times until it is basically exactly what I want. You might be wondering what is the point when it would be faster for me to just write the code myself? I have ADHD and for whatever reason telling the LLM what to do instead of doing it myself bypasses the task avoidance patterns and/or focus problems I tend to suffer f…
But what if the only real way to break through avoidance patterns is to stop avoiding? What if the tradeoffs of LLMs are instant gratification and further atrophying of your executive functions?
I have gained a paranoid suspicion that our capacity to decrease immediate distress with technology has become so great that we are creating a world where people with certain temperaments can have their personalities become more and more extreme through the assistance of technologies which, for example, decrease the amount of interpersonal interaction required or prevent the need for deep focus.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#586I'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…
You’re going to be the least productive developer in any work setting from this point on. There are people checking in 50k lines of solid TDD verified, non bloat, instrument performance checked feature code per day. Your 200 lines isn’t going to cut it for very long.
That may indeed look like quite the speed-up. But the accumulated errors and entropy in such an enterprise will eventually cause a cave-in, at which point the productivity metrics don't look so good.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#587I'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…
I often break these rules for one specific aspect of my personal projects: if it has a web frontend, I don't want to know what kind of CSS magic the agent used to make it look as it looks. I'll happily accept whatever unmaintainable AI slop it produces, because I don't want to spend any time figuring out if my understanding of flexbox (or anything else related) is wrong again, and why.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#588> For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote. I'd look at the diff, verify it compiled, test the happy path, move on. But now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it. I stopped reading after this, because this is the dumbest way to vibe code anything larger than a single-use tool. Claude is a collaborator, an…
bad devs are still bad, good devs are still good
Until the good devs have their skills atrophied away.
Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#589Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder why? Because I like to save time?
...which means you depend on the LLMs? Of course strictly "to save time". It's not like you are slowly forgetting how to start a project in the first palce or implement that db integration, right?
> how to start a project
This is a weird thing to point out. I've always had to look up how to start a project even before LLMs, even with years of experience. With React there's vite, React router, nextjs, tanstack. With nodejs there's Koa, hapi, express, and tons others.
Most fullstack engineers are likely not starting a lot of new projects at work, and may only be doing it a few times for side projects, LLM or no.