9 ms·

I’m spending months coding the old way

364 points by evakhoury 6mo ago

fouronnes3 6mo ago
This is awesome! I myself did a 12 weeks batch at RC (W1'24) and had an absolute blast. Happy coding! Stay curious.
- gregsadetsky 6mo ago
  fellow RC'er here - hi! I was Fall 2 '23.
- culi 6mo ago
  Huge fan of RC. Have a close friend that did it. I've been so close to applying multiple times in my life but the timing just never quite works out
mchusma 6mo ago
You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.
- sdevonoes 6mo ago
  For the average and mundane stuff, sure do whatever everyone is doing. For the good stuff, there’s no alternative but to know and to have taste. Llms change nothing.
- baq 6mo ago
  The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.
  - onair4you 6mo ago
    Not sure what you are using, but that’s easier said than done. I just set up an agent to ensure that my other agent would follow my coding guidelines by using hooks. The coding agent responded by switching to editing with `sed`, etc. to circumvent the hooks. Claude Opus is going to give zero fucks about your attempts to manage it.
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    this is exactly right, I don't manage agents anymore (and have spent countless hours before learning how to do so, now this is a skill like my microsoft access skills (which were amazing back in the day...)
- sd9 6mo ago
  What has been most valuable for you? It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting. Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.
- zingababba 6mo ago
  I see you got downvoted by I agree. I went through a massive valley of despair and turned back to hand crafting only to realize that for me coding was always a means to an end and I really didn't care at all about how I got there. Now I'm having a lot of fun building out all kinds of wonky projects.
- aerhardt 6mo ago
  > It’s really hard How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
  - bensyverson 6mo ago
    You're probably significantly underselling the value of your own "good old software dev practices."
    - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
      I believe the point (which you seem to tacitly agree with) is that a young dev's time is much better spent reading and writing code "the old-fashioned way" vs chasing the new SOTA in AI-assisted development. A competent dev can basically master agentic development in a few months. But it takes years to become competent.
    - aerhardt 6mo ago
      Oh yea, I agree that building good software remains roughly as challenging as ever. I was asking if there was something about the “agentic” part in particular that was difficult.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  Yeah, it's really difficult to remember to tell it "make no mistakes". Typing a prompt is also really hard, especially when you have to remember the cli command to open the agent. Sometimes I even forget if I need to use "medium", "high", or "xhigh" for a task.
  - jodrellblank 6mo ago
    I may as well post this troll comment somewhere and get it out of my system, but have you noticed how people called "slopinthebag" who claim to hate slop and enshittification are the same people who make barrel-scrapingly low-quality thought-free comments which make the sites they are posting on worse for everyone? Shouldn't they be the people making the most substantial, artisanal, sweat-of-the-brow deep-thought comments?
- Marazan 6mo ago
  > It will be relevant for a long time. Citation needed.
- idle_zealot 6mo ago
  > It will be relevant for a long time. Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction. Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.
- the_gipsy 6mo ago
  If they're so great, then we will end up somewhere where it's easy to pick up.
- dyauspitr 6mo ago
  You will be relevant for 6 months until they manage themselves.
- dinkumthinkum 6mo ago
  When you say it's hard, what does that mean? Presumably, if the AI is so good, why can't you just ask it to do that? Why are you even needed?
tossandthrow 6mo ago
I love being able to put my brain cells at lean, coq, haskell. All the fun stuff. And have my money job taken care of mostly with agents.
lrvick 6mo ago
I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and just let LLMs push straight to main for everything and they get hired as senior engineers. It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work. If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. But also, I feel this way about the industry long before LLMs. If you are not confident enough to run Linux on the computer in front of you, no senior sysadmin will hire you to go near their production systems. Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch, and if you want an LLM build all the tools to run one locally for yourself. You will be way more capable and employable if you do not skip straight to using magic you do not understand.
- sho_hn 6mo ago
  > If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.
  - rafaelmn 6mo ago
    Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.
    - lrvick 6mo ago
      But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing. We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption, deterministic builds, full source bootstrapping, secure enclaves, end to end encryption, remote attestation, hardware security auth, or proper code review. Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help because the LLMs were trained to keep doing things the old way unless we direct them to do otherwise from our own base of experience on cutting edge security research no models are trained on sufficiently.
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.
- sho_hn 6mo ago
  Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)
- alemwjsl 6mo ago
  Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead: * Ask someone to come over and look * Come back the next day, work on something else * Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it. But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!
  - justonceokay 6mo ago
    You say this as if the LLM isn’t committing things it doesn’t even recognize as bugs if you don’t babysit it. I’d rather have a codebase with a few very well marked evil zones, rather than a codebase no one has read. All code contains demons and it’s good to have an understanding of their locations and relative power
  - moregrist 6mo ago
    > Come back the next day, work on something else This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems. I generally have 2-4 important things in flight, so I find myself doing this a lot when I get stuck.
    - ignoramous 6mo ago
fallingfrog 6mo ago
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.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  Me too. We're the overpaid cobol programmers of the future
- wulfstan 6mo ago
  I’ve just started a new job and my first month has been coming to terms with a vibe coded codebase. Nobody really understands it. I think that people who have the skills to really know what is there and how it all fits together will be the most valuable workers in future. My ex business partner said “AI won’t take your job, but the person who uses it will”. I don’t agree. The person who isn’t reliant on AI is the one you should really be afraid of.
phaser 6mo ago
Here’s how i do it: I create a lot of stuff using AI to the max, but I also spend the necessary of time on reviewing that the AI is producing code that passes my cognitive load standards. this involves some tokens spent on grooming code and documenting well. Most of this is effortless thanks to an AGENTS.md based on this: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/README.prompt.md https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/READM... but i have a good sense of catching when things are getting weird and i steer back. Then, when credits run out. It’s show time! The code is neatly organized, abstractions make sense, comments are helpful so I have a solid ground to do some good old organic human coding. I make sure that when i’m approaching limits I’m asking the AI to set the stage. I used to get frustrated when credits ran out because the AI was making something I would need to study to comprehend. Now I’m eager to the next “brain time hand-out” It sounds weird but it’s a form of teamwork. I have the means to pay for a larger plan but i’d rather keep my brain active.
- flawn 6mo ago
  Thanks for sharing. I have thought about approaches by deliberately leaving tasks to me while the agent does something to keep my brain active & prevent atrophy. Maybe I should work on a Claude Code skill/hook for that :)
- brianush1 6mo ago
  > Don’t abuse DRY, a little duplication is better than unnecessary dependencies. That's an interesting thing to include. I agree with this point in principle, but I've found that Claude, at least, duplicates logic FAR too often and needs nudging in the other direction.
  - deaux 6mo ago
    > but I've found that Claude, at least You hit on a very important point here. The linked AGENTS.md is a bad idea for general purpose use because the things it's meant to tackle, including an inherent bias towards or against DRY, is one of the big differences between model families. GPT 5.4 Codex has a very different "coding personality" from Claude Opus. It's a product of whatever model it was tested on.
AstroBen 6mo ago
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).
- heyalexhsu 6mo ago
  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...
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    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
    - justapassenger 6mo ago
      You’re describing extremely valid approach for a hobby. Less for a business.
      - latexr 6mo ago
        The fact so many people think businesses need to do do do, faster faster faster, now now now, at all costs is a major reason everything sucks, everything is fucked up, everyone is exploited.
      - orphea 6mo ago
        No, they are not. Even ignoring business where using AI would have consequences for you (medical is one example), there are plenty "normal" software companies that value quality over slop.
delbronski 6mo ago
So we’ve already grown nostalgic for the old days… skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then… but it’s been 6 hours and I can’t figure out why this does not work anymore. So you read some docs but they are poorly written. So you find something on Google and try to hack that into your solution. But nope, now more stuff broke. There goes your day.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  Yeah, why spend time puzzling over old, proven code that you wrote. Instead spend your time puzzling over new, unproven code that an LLM generated
- AstroBen 6mo ago
  > skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then This is exactly how you learn to create better abstractions and write clear code that future you will understand.
  - delbronski 6mo ago
    You are right about the learning part. But I’ve been at this for 20 years. Even the best, most pristine and organizad code I’ve seen has not been “clear”. The average LLM code today is a lot more clear than the average developer code.
- civvv 6mo ago
  Literally a skill issue?
  - delbronski 6mo ago
    Yes. A skill I have not mastered in 20 years. And I’ve yet to meet a person who has. If you are out here writing perfectly looking code 100% of the time that everyone else including you can perfectly understand a year later, then hats off to you. But in my long career even the smartest most experienced software engineers I’ve met m write their share of crazy abstractions from hell.
moomin 6mo ago
Not the point of the article but > 15 years of Clojure experience My God I’m old.
- mattdecker100 6mo ago
  Old? OP showed a pic of an Apple IIe. I bought one for a few thousand bucks (I forget exactly how much). I've been an SE for 44 years. We just added the final abstraction layer.
linkregister 6mo ago
It's easy to take for granted lots of experience programming before the advent of LLMs. This seems like a good strategy to develop understanding of software engineering. I remember writing BASIC on the Apple II back when it wasn't retro to do so!
ludr 6mo ago
I've settled into a pattern of using agents for work (where throughput/results are the most important) and doing things the hard way for personal or learning projects (where the learning is more important).
einpoklum 6mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 6mo ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. You can make your substantive points without that.
brianjlogan 6mo ago
I started using Zed as a half measure. I think I'll start using AI for planning and suggested implementation steps. I am seeing non technical people getting involved building apps with Claude. After the Openclaw and other Agentic obsession trends I just don't see it pragmatic to continue down the road of AI obsession. In most other aspects of life my skills were valuated because of my ability to care about details under the hood and the ability to get my hands dirty on new problems. Curious to see how the market adapts and how people find ways to communicate this ability for nuance.
pizzafeelsright 6mo ago
I like to write personal letters too. I also send emails. I do the former for fun. The latter to provide for my family. There is a reason old men take on hobbies like woodworking and fixing old cars and other stuff that has been replaced by technology.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
daneel_w 6mo ago
Depressing. It's like reading has-been actors' stories about how they went to wellness retreats to "reconnect with themselves" to try get back on the job. I can't wait for the day when the same type of people as the author - or indeed, the author himself - start labeling plain regular programming as "artisanal" and "craft".
- Izkata 6mo ago
  It's not very common but people have been using "artisanal" for months.
bitwize 6mo ago
The fact that with AI development, your brain is no longer in a tight feedback loop with the codebase, leading to a significant drift between your model and reality, is still a sticking point with me and agentic development. It feels like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. I lose all precision and dexterity. I still keep hoping there'll be a glut of demand for traditional software engineers once the bibbi in the babka goes boom in production systems in a big way: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W1CHhxDSk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W1CHhxDSk But agentic workflows are so good now—and bound to get better with things like Claude Mythos—that programming without LLMs looks more and more cooked as a professional technique (rather than a curiosity or exercise) with each passing day. Human software engineers may well end up out of the loop completely except for the endpoints in a few years.
derangedHorse 6mo ago
> We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat I saw this quote when looking at the Recurse Center website. How does one usually go about something like this if they work full time? Does this mainly target those who are just entering the industry or between jobs? I know the article is mostly about what the author built at the coding retreat, but now he has me interested in trying to attend one!
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- wonger_ 6mo ago
  Yes mostly in between jobs: https://www.recurse.com/who https://www.recurse.com/who Unless you can swing a six week sabbatical and return to your current job
- nicholasjbs 6mo ago
  (Recurse Center cofounder here) Most folks do RC between jobs, either because they quit their job specifically to do RC or because they lost their job and then decide to apply. Other common ways are as part of a formal sabbatical (returning either to an industry job or to academia), as part of garden leave, or while on summer break (for college and grad students). We also get a fair number of freelancers/independent contractors (who stop doing their normal work during their batches), as well as some retirees. Some folks use RC as a way to enter the industry (both new grads and folks switching careers), though the majority of people who attend have already worked professionally as programmers. We've had people aged 12 to early 70s attend, though most Recursers are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
birdfood 6mo ago
Getting to spend 3 months on a self learning journey sounds wonderful. My hunch is that these deep skills will be valuable long term and that this new abstraction is not the same as moving from assembly to c, but I am not completely sure. Lately most of my code has been llm generated and I can’t say I feel any sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or satisfaction at the end of a work day. But I’ve also come to realise I really only enjoy 5-10% of the coding anyway and the rest is all the tedious semi-mechanical changes that support that small interesting core. On the scale of human history working with computers is a blip in time and I wonder how the period of hand writing code will be viewed in a hundred years, perhaps as a footnote or simply bundled as ‘everything before machines were self automating’.
- ACS_Solver 6mo ago
  I think it's possible that the current shift will be similar to the "assembly to compiled language" shift. Once upon a time we wrote code in assembly language. Then we moved to C or other compiled languages. Assembly programming remained a very useful but niche skill. You compile your code and trust the compiler. You can examine the compiler output and that is at times necessary, but that's not something most developers know how to do. We may be looking at something similar. Most development work moving to the LLM abstraction level, with the skills being writing good prompts, managing the context window, agents, memories and so on. Some developers will be able to examine LLM generated code and spot problems there, but most will not have that skill. I'm not sure how to feel about it. Since ChatGPT showed up and until a couple months ago, I was firmly skeptical of LLM programming. We had new models every few weeks and I felt like each new model is just a different twist on the same low quality slop output. But recently the models seem to have crossed some threshold where their capabilities really improved and I have now used Claude - still using it sparingly - to implement features in much less time than I'd need myself or to locate a bug based on just log output. I don't yet buy the "coding is solved" hype but we're at least looking at the biggest change to programming since the adoption of high-level programming languages.
  - archagon 6mo ago
    AI is not an abstraction layer — no more than paying contractors is an “abstraction” over writing the code yourself.
apricot 6mo ago
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 taught them about assembly language and told them about the registers, instructions, and addressing modes of the chip, memory map and monitor routines of the Apple, and after that we went and wrote a few programs together, mostly using the low-resolution graphics mode (40x40): a drawing program, a bouncing ball, culminating in hand-rolled sprites with simple collision detection. Their assignment is to write a simple program (I suggested a low-res game like Snake or Tetris but they can do whatever they want provided they tell me about it and I okay it), demo their program, and then explain to the class how it works. At first they hated the line editor. But then a very interesting thing happened. They started thinking about their code before writing it. Planning. Discussing things in advance. Everything we told them they should do before coding in previous classes, but they didn't do because a powerful editor was right there so why not use it?... And then they started to get used to the line editor. They told me they didn't need to really see the code on the screen, it was in their head. They will of course go back to modern tools after class is finished, but I think it's good for them to have this kind of experience.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- flawn 6mo ago
  Is this course online available? Sounds like great fun.
- ssgodderidge 6mo ago
  Whoa, I didn’t know such an thing existed. What emulator do you use?
  - apricot 6mo ago
    AppleWin, and the assembler is an early version of Glen Bredon's Merlin.
abcde666777 6mo ago
Personally I haven't stopped doing things the old way. I haven't had any issues using LLMs as rubber ducks or brain storming assistants - they can be particularly useful for identifying algorithms which might solve a given problem you're unfamiliar with. Basically a variant on google searching. But when it comes to the final act I find myself unwilling to let an LLM write the actual code - I still do it myself. Perhaps because my main project at the moment is a game I've been working on for four years, so the codebase is sizable, non-trivial, and all written by me. My strong sense even since coding LLMs showed up has been that continuing to write the code is important for keeping it coherent and manageable as a whole, including my mental model of it. And also: for keeping myself happy working on it. The enjoyment would be gone if I leaned that far into LLMs.
- bschwindHN 6mo ago
  I'm in the same boat. LLMs help with some research and idea bouncing, and then I write all the code myself. Despite what some might say, there isn't a big moat between those who use LLMs for programming and those who don't. So if I ever truly need to use LLMs to survive, I'll just have to start paying for a subscription. In the meantime, I'll be keeping my own skills sharp and see how that turns out in a few years. I'm afraid software quality is going to take a nosedive in the near future, it was already on a downward trend.
fsckboy 6mo ago
how about the whole thing was written by an AI as satire, mocking human "coding retreat"
epx 6mo ago
It is all a conspiracy, now that mechanical keyboards are affordable and available and so many shapes and switches, they want to take this last pleasure (typing) from us
- bschwindHN 6mo ago
  Right?? I've gotten into mechanical keyboards quite a lot the past few years and it has totally made development and writing more enjoyable. Not giving that up any time soon.
serbrech 6mo ago
Should have LLM providers create stack overflow type of site based on user’s most asked problem. At least we won’t deplete de source of normal searches results.
dang 6mo ago
[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)
- sho_hn 6mo ago
  Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand?
  - phoronixrly 6mo ago
    I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...
    - tayo42 6mo ago
      Taking 3 months off from work to do program some basic stuff is already kind of disconnected from reality.
  - justonceokay 6mo ago
    Well when the fashions change, the old ways are “old fashioned” but only literally
- edjgeek 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- SrslyJosh 6mo ago
  > "coding the old way" You mean the way that the majority of code is still written by professionals?
  - sayYayToLife 6mo ago
    [dead]
mindcrime 6mo ago
I'm a big advocate for AI, including GenAI. But I still spend a fair amount of time coding by hand, or "by hand + Copilot completions enabled". And yes, I will use spec driven development with SpecKit + OpenCode, or just straight up "vibe code" on occasion but so far I am unwilling to abdicate my responsibility to understand code and abandon the knowledge of how to write it. Heck, I even bought a couple of new LISP and Java books lately to bone up on various corners of those respectively. And I got a couple of Forth books before that. Not planning to stop coding completely for a while, if ever.
- scarface_74 6mo ago
  My responsibility is to make sure my code meets functional and non functional requirements. It’s to understand the *behavior*. My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that. Someone thought I was naive when I said my vibe coded internal web admin site met the security requirements without looking at a line of code. I knew that because the requirements were that anyone who had access to the site could do anything on the site and the site was secured with Amazon Cognito credentials and the Lambda that served it had a least privileged role attached. If either of those invariants were broken, Claude has found a major AWS vulnerability.
  - sgarland 6mo ago
    Did you mean to reply to someone else? This seems awfully defensive for a reply to parent’s comment.
    - imtringued 6mo ago
      Yeah only the first two sentences were actually relevant. The rest was a humble brag that there is no application level security, which is a really weird thing to brag about. When I use SAML, I still have to check that the user has some sort of attribute that indicates that access was granted to the application. If this access rule is defined outside the application, then why bring up Claude? If it isn't then Claude is responsible for implementing the access rule, which means the comment is 100% wrong.
beej71 6mo ago
I'll bet we see more and more of this in the future. As developer skills atrophy due to over-reliance on LLMs, we'll have to keep our skills sharp somehow. What better way than a sabbatical?
- linzhangrun 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- bendmorris 6mo ago
  To answer "what better way," clearly using the skills regularly is much better. Letting them atrophy for potentially multiple years and then trying to resurrect them repeatedly doesn't seem like a recipe for maintaining sharp skills to me.
  - beej71 6mo ago
    That's definitely optimal, but I don't think a lot of people are going to have that opportunity. It's not really in the short-term interest of a company to have people spending time on that.
temporallobe 6mo ago
The very first few years of my career I spent writing code (mostly Perl) in vi (not even vim) on a SPARC running Solaris. I bought myself the O’Riley Perl Cookbook and that was pretty much my sole guide apart from the few internet forums that were available at the time. Search engines were still primitive, so getting help when you got stuck was far more difficult. But it forced me to deeply learn a lot of things - Perl syntax (we had no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) terminal tools, and especially vi keystrokes. Looking back, there was far less distraction and “noise”, though I admit that could have been the fact that it was the beginning of my career and expectations were lower. I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex.
- andsoitis 6mo ago
  > I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex. For me it was GW-BASIC and no editor as we know them today. That was instant gratification, rapid development, no silly layers. It was pretty pure. It is what hooked me. In a sense, agentic coding, has brought back the excitement to building software for me because I don’t have to wrangle all the crazy enterprise or other modern development considerations directly. There’s a closer connection between thought and result, which is what was the magic that captured my imagination.
fouronnes3 6mo ago
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 with LLM training? Like what is the 1MB of text data that if I insert it into the training set harms LLM training performance the most?
- inerte 6mo ago
  > Can you design text data specifically to mess with LLM training? Maybe text that costs a LOT of tokens. Very, very verbose. I think if there are rules and on the internet, LLMs can eventually figure it out, so you have to make it expensive. Another way would be to go offline. Never write it down, only talk about it at least 50 meters away from your phone. Transmitted through memory and whisper.
- mswphd 6mo ago
  LLM's train in some standardized ways to emit things like tool calls, right? if you make those tokens a fundamental part of your programming language, it's possible you'd be able to run into tokenizer bugs that make LLMs much more annoying to use. Pure conjecture though.
- dougiejones 6mo ago
  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.
  - andsoitis 6mo ago
    I thought about it, and had ideas like function -> fuck and throw -> shit. But I think humans would actually find it more distracting and unpleasant than an LLM would because we are more affected by social and emotional norms. Maybe there’s another way…
- 6mo ago
sph 6mo ago
This title is the most depressing thing I have read on this site
- tikotus 6mo ago
  I had to see if it was a joke. Oh, my.
- zombot 6mo ago
  And this is only the beginning. Wait until they send you to the insane asylum for talking about coding by hand.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 6mo ago
    There is a pretty intense campaign to shift the overton window around coding where anchoring is used repeatedly. When Jensen Huang says you need to spend $500k on tokens per developer per year he knows it will be perceived as bullshit, but by setting such a high he's subtly making spending $0 seem abnormal and irrational. This article does the same thing. It's the same reason most companies have an ultra deluxe $150 /month plan nobody buys.
- Remdo 6mo ago
  I thought Hacker News was a place where you could share your views and discuss them with different people, but your comment seems to show that it now became a Facebook comment section. Thank you for your eye-opening contribution.
  - orphea 6mo ago
    Well, they did share their view and it's being discussed, so what's the problem?
    - 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
joewongg 6mo ago
[dead]
kolleykibber 6mo ago
Crazy to think this headline would have been satire a year ago.
myst 6mo ago
I hope this is some kind of fiction. Certainly reads this way.
huflungdung 6mo ago
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elAhmo 6mo ago
It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  It worries me that I’m losing my muscle memory, especially for the new technologies and programming languages I have been working with over the past year (as it’s suddenly so much easier to get shit done), and I feel like I’m creating a knowledge debt as I go. I’m very concerned about how the next generation of software engineers will pick up deep knowledge about this stuff, if at all.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  “Writing by hand” two years ago is analogous to writing without an IDE, which was rare.
- andersmurphy 6mo ago
  The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end. I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.
  - Hrun0 6mo ago
    YC startups still have to be open source though, right?
    - elAhmo 6mo ago
      Where did you get that impression? Most aren’t
      - Hrun0 6mo ago
        I was under the impression that YC startups need to be open source. My bad!
sergiopreira 6mo ago
[dead]
yodsanklai 6mo ago
> so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way the old way which is about one year ago?
- derwiki 6mo ago
  I mean ya, management at my company has made it clear that all of our code should be written by agents. So yea, things have changed a lot in a year.
  - 6031769 6mo ago
    Please come back in a year and tell us how that has worked out for them.
  - teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
    How embarrassing for them.
assimpleaspossi 6mo ago
>>ai is here. so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way The old way?! So not using AI is already being called "the old way"?!! That statement sends alarm bells off about writing on the internet and trust to be put into it as if I'm the first one to notice it.
- bertil 6mo ago
  People were still writing code by hand three months ago…
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
octagons 6mo ago
I think the author’s intent is well-placed, but it does feel a bit sad that this subject is blog-worthy. I’ve spent a lifetime teaching myself programming, computers, and engineering. I have no formal education in these disciplines and find that I excel due to the self-taught nature of my background. I take a very metered approach to AI and use it for autocomplete while still scrutinizing every token (not the AI kind) as well as an augment to my self-pedagogy. It’s great to be able to “query” or get a summary from a set of technical documents on demand. However, I don’t understand the desire to remove oneself from the process with AI. I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills. There’s more to engineering than simply programming. Both the engineer and the intended user base must also understand the system. The value lost is greater than the sum of all the parts when an LLM produces most or all of the code.
- pretzel5297 6mo ago
  > I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills. Not trying to be rude but you either must not be a professional software engineer or your skill level isn't that high yet. You simply cannot always do things that teach you new skills or improve existing ones. In any sufficiently complex project, even the most novel ones, you'll do things you've done many times before.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    I'm a bit skeptical too, but I can understand his points. Most of what is rote is probably written somewhere and if you have a library of code and snippets (including the existing project), it's easy to copy and adapt it. And that activity is very inducing to flow state, so you don't mind the time spent.
  - octagons 6mo ago
    I’m not a software engineer. Most of my work these days focuses on microcontroller exploitation. I have 15 years of professional experience as a security consultant/contractor.
  - t43562 6mo ago
JAG_Ecalona 6mo ago
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ironman1478 6mo ago
I didn't realize how I learned to develop software from 2011-2015 was the old way lol. (Am I old now?). I appreciate that the author understands why doing everything "the old way" is good. AI is a tool, it can't be a replacement for how you think and it can't be a replacement for the actual work. I wish more people had a desire for the inner workings of things because it makes you better at actually using tools. Implementing compilers, databases, OSes, control systems, etc. is like practicing swimming. Yeah, you might not ever swim again but when you need to the muscle memory will be there when you need to get out of the ocean (I know this is a strained metaphor). Knowing more can only be a boon to using LLMs for coding and it's really a general problem in ML. I work in a science field as hw / sw engineer and I've seen so many pure data science people say they can replace all our work with a model, flail for 2 years and then their whole org gets canned. If they just read a textbook or collaborated (which they never do, no matter how polite you are), they'd have been able to leverage their data science skills to build something great and instead they just toil away never making it past step 0.
KaiShips 6mo ago
[flagged]
whateveracct 6mo ago
i feel like i'm being gaslit into believing that coding was ever hard or the bottleneck. Typing and thinking in English is demonstrably slower than in code/the abstract (Haskell for me.) And no, I didn't write English plans before AI. Or have a stream of English thought in my head. Or even pronounce code as I read and wrote it. That's low-skill stuff.
- booleandilemma 6mo ago
  It's the opposite. Coding was, and is, still hard. If you don't believe me go do an Advent of Code challenge after day 15. LLMs have tricked everyone into believing coding is easy.
  - whateveracct 6mo ago
    I'm confused though. I have never like spent hours at a time coding at my job or side projects. And yet I keep building stuff.. I tried LLMs because of AI fomo by my CEO. "Opus 4.whatever is a stepwise improvement - I am convinced all coders who don't go all-in on AI will be obsolete soon." Multiple times I tried. Every time Claude creates crap and I have to spend a bunch of time correcting it in a loop. Or basically scripting it. And it's like..I never spent this much time thinking or actively working before. So I'm back to being natty and I am delivering more and have more time during the workday to spend with my wife and kid and video games etc.
andai 6mo ago
From the linked article by Cal Newport: > One solution to this constant companion problem: Spend more time with your phone out of easy reach. If it’s not nearby, it won’t be as likely to trigger your motivational neurons, helping clear your brain to focus on other activities with less distraction. Reminds me of this study: "The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance" The effect persisted even when the phone was switched off. It only went away when the phone was moved to a different part of the building. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
bustah 6mo ago
[flagged]
wkjagt 6mo ago
I left big tech about 5 years ago, which was an interesting timing looking back. It's not even that long ago, but man have things completely changed since then. I still code a lot, but only for fun. I've never even tried agentic coding. I'm kinda sad that "coding the old way" (as what this apparently is now) has become obsolete so quickly, but also very grateful that I was coincidentally born at the right time to have lived through a good chunk of time where people still wrote code themselves.
ofjcihen 6mo ago
Anecdotally I found that it was very easy to just throw everything at the LLM. That was fine until I realized once I got stuck that I was basically lost. It only took 2 weeks for years of knowledge to feel very “foreign”. Recently I’ve been trying to combat this by learning things “deeper” IE. yes I can secure and respond to container based threats but how do containers actually work deep down? So far I think it’s working well and as an odd plus it’s actually helping me use AI more efficiently when I need to.
animanoir 6mo ago
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Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
the cal newport quote in the post is doing a lot of work. the strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout. fine, but the gym analogy breaks down somewhere. in a gym, the person who actually lifts heavier gets noticed. in software, the person with the right bio and the right network gets noticed, regardless of whether they've ever lifted anything real. you can spend three years learning compilers properly and have a handful of readers. someone else ships a wrapper on a saturday and lands a pmarca quote tweet by monday. coding the old way is good for you. i'm not convinced it's what gets you noticed. the strain was never really what got rewarded in the first place.
- LittleBox 6mo ago
  I agree with you sentiment although I disagree with the sentence > coding the old way is good for you. i'm not convinced it's what gets you noticed. You won’t go completely unnoticed if you’re good at your job but you can only be noticed from your deliverables, which is a slow process. You can buff up your presence by talking about it a lot, yes, but you won’t get 0 attention for hard work.
  - Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
    [dead]
CivBase 6mo ago
I strongly believe that code should always be subjected to review before entering production. This does a few things: 1. It increases the chances of any bugs being found and resolved. 2. It encourages the author to be more careful with their code to avoid long reviews with a lot of findings. 3. It ensures at least two people - the author and approverd - have familiarity with the code. 4. It spreads responsibility for the code across at least two people - the author and approvers. It's clear this article's author does not review their own code. I sure hope that code is not used for anything important.

364 points by evakhoury 6mo ago

fouronnes3 6mo ago

This is awesome! I myself did a 12 weeks batch at RC (W1'24) and had an absolute blast. Happy coding! Stay curious.

gregsadetsky 6mo ago
fellow RC'er here - hi! I was Fall 2 '23.
culi 6mo ago
Huge fan of RC. Have a close friend that did it. I've been so close to applying multiple times in my life but the timing just never quite works out

mchusma 6mo ago

You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.

sdevonoes 6mo ago
For the average and mundane stuff, sure do whatever everyone is doing. For the good stuff, there’s no alternative but to know and to have taste. Llms change nothing.
baq 6mo ago
The agents are already learning to manage agents, if it’s relevancy you’re looking for you might want to take up plumbing instead.
- onair4you 6mo ago
  Not sure what you are using, but that’s easier said than done. I just set up an agent to ensure that my other agent would follow my coding guidelines by using hooks. The coding agent responded by switching to editing with `sed`, etc. to circumvent the hooks. Claude Opus is going to give zero fucks about your attempts to manage it.
- bdangubic 6mo ago
  this is exactly right, I don't manage agents anymore (and have spent countless hours before learning how to do so, now this is a skill like my microsoft access skills (which were amazing back in the day...)
sd9 6mo ago
What has been most valuable for you? It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting. Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.
zingababba 6mo ago
I see you got downvoted by I agree. I went through a massive valley of despair and turned back to hand crafting only to realize that for me coding was always a means to an end and I really didn't care at all about how I got there. Now I'm having a lot of fun building out all kinds of wonky projects.
aerhardt 6mo ago
> It’s really hard How? I just open multiple terminal panes, use git tree, and then basically it’s good old software dev practices. What am I missing?
- bensyverson 6mo ago
  You're probably significantly underselling the value of your own "good old software dev practices."
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    I believe the point (which you seem to tacitly agree with) is that a young dev's time is much better spent reading and writing code "the old-fashioned way" vs chasing the new SOTA in AI-assisted development. A competent dev can basically master agentic development in a few months. But it takes years to become competent.
  - aerhardt 6mo ago
    Oh yea, I agree that building good software remains roughly as challenging as ever. I was asking if there was something about the “agentic” part in particular that was difficult.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
Yeah, it's really difficult to remember to tell it "make no mistakes". Typing a prompt is also really hard, especially when you have to remember the cli command to open the agent. Sometimes I even forget if I need to use "medium", "high", or "xhigh" for a task.
- jodrellblank 6mo ago
  I may as well post this troll comment somewhere and get it out of my system, but have you noticed how people called "slopinthebag" who claim to hate slop and enshittification are the same people who make barrel-scrapingly low-quality thought-free comments which make the sites they are posting on worse for everyone? Shouldn't they be the people making the most substantial, artisanal, sweat-of-the-brow deep-thought comments?
Marazan 6mo ago
> It will be relevant for a long time. Citation needed.
idle_zealot 6mo ago
> It will be relevant for a long time. Why would you think that? The landscape is fast-moving. Prompting tricks and "AI skills" of yesterday are already dated and sometimes actively counterproductive. The explicit goal of the companies working on the tech is to lower the barriers to entry and make it easier to use, building harnesses and doing refinement that align LLMs to an intuitive mode of interaction. Do you think they'll fail? Do you think we've plateaued in terms of what using a computer looks like and your learnings for wrangling the agents of this year will be relevant for whatever the new hotness is next year? It's a strong claim that demands similarly strong argument to support.
the_gipsy 6mo ago
If they're so great, then we will end up somewhere where it's easy to pick up.
dyauspitr 6mo ago
You will be relevant for 6 months until they manage themselves.
dinkumthinkum 6mo ago
When you say it's hard, what does that mean? Presumably, if the AI is so good, why can't you just ask it to do that? Why are you even needed?

tossandthrow 6mo ago

I love being able to put my brain cells at lean, coq, haskell. All the fun stuff. And have my money job taken care of mostly with agents.

lrvick 6mo ago

I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out. LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing so not mad at that at all. I review and own every line I commit, and feel no desire to go back to the old way. What scares the shit out of me are all these new CS grads that admit they have never coded anything more complex than basic class assignments by hand, and just let LLMs push straight to main for everything and they get hired as senior engineers. It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work. If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. But also, I feel this way about the industry long before LLMs. If you are not confident enough to run Linux on the computer in front of you, no senior sysadmin will hire you to go near their production systems. Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch, and if you want an LLM build all the tools to run one locally for yourself. You will be way more capable and employable if you do not skip straight to using magic you do not understand.

sho_hn 6mo ago
> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code. So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers? Serious question.
- rafaelmn 6mo ago
  Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast. I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.
  - lrvick 6mo ago
    But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing. We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption, deterministic builds, full source bootstrapping, secure enclaves, end to end encryption, remote attestation, hardware security auth, or proper code review. Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help because the LLMs were trained to keep doing things the old way unless we direct them to do otherwise from our own base of experience on cutting edge security research no models are trained on sufficiently.

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago

This is ominous and very depressing given what we've recently learned / reconfirmed about LLMs sapping our ability to persist through difficult problems: > There were 2 or 3 bugs that stumped me, and after 20 min or so of debugging I asked Claude for some advice. But most of the debugging was by hand! Twenty whole minutes. Us old-timers (I am 39) are chortling. I am not trying to knock the author specifically. But he was doing this for education, not for work. He should have spent more like 6 hours before desperately reaching for the LLM. I imagine after 1 hour he would have figured it out on his own.

sho_hn 6mo ago
Now imagine someone else reading this and genuinely considering 20 minutes a long time to wait :-)
alemwjsl 6mo ago
Yep and after 6 hours don't reach for LLM, instead: * Ask someone to come over and look * Come back the next day, work on something else * Add comment # KNOWN-ISSUE: ...., and move on and forget about it. But year spent days on a bug at work before ha ha!
- justonceokay 6mo ago
  You say this as if the LLM isn’t committing things it doesn’t even recognize as bugs if you don’t babysit it. I’d rather have a codebase with a few very well marked evil zones, rather than a codebase no one has read. All code contains demons and it’s good to have an understanding of their locations and relative power
- moregrist 6mo ago
  > Come back the next day, work on something else This is a tried and true way of working on puzzles and other hard problems. I generally have 2-4 important things in flight, so I find myself doing this a lot when I get stuck.
  - ignoramous 6mo ago

fallingfrog 6mo ago

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.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
Me too. We're the overpaid cobol programmers of the future
wulfstan 6mo ago
I’ve just started a new job and my first month has been coming to terms with a vibe coded codebase. Nobody really understands it. I think that people who have the skills to really know what is there and how it all fits together will be the most valuable workers in future. My ex business partner said “AI won’t take your job, but the person who uses it will”. I don’t agree. The person who isn’t reliant on AI is the one you should really be afraid of.

phaser 6mo ago

Here’s how i do it: I create a lot of stuff using AI to the max, but I also spend the necessary of time on reviewing that the AI is producing code that passes my cognitive load standards. this involves some tokens spent on grooming code and documenting well. Most of this is effortless thanks to an AGENTS.md based on this: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/README.prompt.md https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/READM... but i have a good sense of catching when things are getting weird and i steer back. Then, when credits run out. It’s show time! The code is neatly organized, abstractions make sense, comments are helpful so I have a solid ground to do some good old organic human coding. I make sure that when i’m approaching limits I’m asking the AI to set the stage. I used to get frustrated when credits ran out because the AI was making something I would need to study to comprehend. Now I’m eager to the next “brain time hand-out” It sounds weird but it’s a form of teamwork. I have the means to pay for a larger plan but i’d rather keep my brain active.

flawn 6mo ago
Thanks for sharing. I have thought about approaches by deliberately leaving tasks to me while the agent does something to keep my brain active & prevent atrophy. Maybe I should work on a Claude Code skill/hook for that :)
brianush1 6mo ago
> Don’t abuse DRY, a little duplication is better than unnecessary dependencies. That's an interesting thing to include. I agree with this point in principle, but I've found that Claude, at least, duplicates logic FAR too often and needs nudging in the other direction.
- deaux 6mo ago
  > but I've found that Claude, at least You hit on a very important point here. The linked AGENTS.md is a bad idea for general purpose use because the things it's meant to tackle, including an inherent bias towards or against DRY, is one of the big differences between model families. GPT 5.4 Codex has a very different "coding personality" from Claude Opus. It's a product of whatever model it was tested on.

AstroBen 6mo ago

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).

heyalexhsu 6mo ago
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...
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  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
  - justapassenger 6mo ago
    You’re describing extremely valid approach for a hobby. Less for a business.
    - latexr 6mo ago
      The fact so many people think businesses need to do do do, faster faster faster, now now now, at all costs is a major reason everything sucks, everything is fucked up, everyone is exploited.
    - orphea 6mo ago
      No, they are not. Even ignoring business where using AI would have consequences for you (medical is one example), there are plenty "normal" software companies that value quality over slop.

delbronski 6mo ago

So we’ve already grown nostalgic for the old days… skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then… but it’s been 6 hours and I can’t figure out why this does not work anymore. So you read some docs but they are poorly written. So you find something on Google and try to hack that into your solution. But nope, now more stuff broke. There goes your day.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
Yeah, why spend time puzzling over old, proven code that you wrote. Instead spend your time puzzling over new, unproven code that an LLM generated
AstroBen 6mo ago
> skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then This is exactly how you learn to create better abstractions and write clear code that future you will understand.
- delbronski 6mo ago
  You are right about the learning part. But I’ve been at this for 20 years. Even the best, most pristine and organizad code I’ve seen has not been “clear”. The average LLM code today is a lot more clear than the average developer code.
civvv 6mo ago
Literally a skill issue?
- delbronski 6mo ago
  Yes. A skill I have not mastered in 20 years. And I’ve yet to meet a person who has. If you are out here writing perfectly looking code 100% of the time that everyone else including you can perfectly understand a year later, then hats off to you. But in my long career even the smartest most experienced software engineers I’ve met m write their share of crazy abstractions from hell.

moomin 6mo ago

Not the point of the article but > 15 years of Clojure experience My God I’m old.

mattdecker100 6mo ago
Old? OP showed a pic of an Apple IIe. I bought one for a few thousand bucks (I forget exactly how much). I've been an SE for 44 years. We just added the final abstraction layer.

linkregister 6mo ago

It's easy to take for granted lots of experience programming before the advent of LLMs. This seems like a good strategy to develop understanding of software engineering. I remember writing BASIC on the Apple II back when it wasn't retro to do so!

ludr 6mo ago

I've settled into a pattern of using agents for work (where throughput/results are the most important) and doing things the hard way for personal or learning projects (where the learning is more important).

einpoklum 6mo ago

[flagged]

dang 6mo ago
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. You can make your substantive points without that.

brianjlogan 6mo ago

I started using Zed as a half measure. I think I'll start using AI for planning and suggested implementation steps. I am seeing non technical people getting involved building apps with Claude. After the Openclaw and other Agentic obsession trends I just don't see it pragmatic to continue down the road of AI obsession. In most other aspects of life my skills were valuated because of my ability to care about details under the hood and the ability to get my hands dirty on new problems. Curious to see how the market adapts and how people find ways to communicate this ability for nuance.

pizzafeelsright 6mo ago

I like to write personal letters too. I also send emails. I do the former for fun. The latter to provide for my family. There is a reason old men take on hobbies like woodworking and fixing old cars and other stuff that has been replaced by technology.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

daneel_w 6mo ago

Depressing. It's like reading has-been actors' stories about how they went to wellness retreats to "reconnect with themselves" to try get back on the job. I can't wait for the day when the same type of people as the author - or indeed, the author himself - start labeling plain regular programming as "artisanal" and "craft".

Izkata 6mo ago
It's not very common but people have been using "artisanal" for months.

bitwize 6mo ago

The fact that with AI development, your brain is no longer in a tight feedback loop with the codebase, leading to a significant drift between your model and reality, is still a sticking point with me and agentic development. It feels like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. I lose all precision and dexterity. I still keep hoping there'll be a glut of demand for traditional software engineers once the bibbi in the babka goes boom in production systems in a big way: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W1CHhxDSk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1W1CHhxDSk But agentic workflows are so good now—and bound to get better with things like Claude Mythos—that programming without LLMs looks more and more cooked as a professional technique (rather than a curiosity or exercise) with each passing day. Human software engineers may well end up out of the loop completely except for the endpoints in a few years.

derangedHorse 6mo ago

> We don’t have teachers or a curriculum, and there’s very little required structure beyond making a full-time commitment during your retreat I saw this quote when looking at the Recurse Center website. How does one usually go about something like this if they work full time? Does this mainly target those who are just entering the industry or between jobs? I know the article is mostly about what the author built at the coding retreat, but now he has me interested in trying to attend one!

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
wonger_ 6mo ago
Yes mostly in between jobs: https://www.recurse.com/who https://www.recurse.com/who Unless you can swing a six week sabbatical and return to your current job
nicholasjbs 6mo ago
(Recurse Center cofounder here) Most folks do RC between jobs, either because they quit their job specifically to do RC or because they lost their job and then decide to apply. Other common ways are as part of a formal sabbatical (returning either to an industry job or to academia), as part of garden leave, or while on summer break (for college and grad students). We also get a fair number of freelancers/independent contractors (who stop doing their normal work during their batches), as well as some retirees. Some folks use RC as a way to enter the industry (both new grads and folks switching careers), though the majority of people who attend have already worked professionally as programmers. We've had people aged 12 to early 70s attend, though most Recursers are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

birdfood 6mo ago

Getting to spend 3 months on a self learning journey sounds wonderful. My hunch is that these deep skills will be valuable long term and that this new abstraction is not the same as moving from assembly to c, but I am not completely sure. Lately most of my code has been llm generated and I can’t say I feel any sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, or satisfaction at the end of a work day. But I’ve also come to realise I really only enjoy 5-10% of the coding anyway and the rest is all the tedious semi-mechanical changes that support that small interesting core. On the scale of human history working with computers is a blip in time and I wonder how the period of hand writing code will be viewed in a hundred years, perhaps as a footnote or simply bundled as ‘everything before machines were self automating’.

ACS_Solver 6mo ago
I think it's possible that the current shift will be similar to the "assembly to compiled language" shift. Once upon a time we wrote code in assembly language. Then we moved to C or other compiled languages. Assembly programming remained a very useful but niche skill. You compile your code and trust the compiler. You can examine the compiler output and that is at times necessary, but that's not something most developers know how to do. We may be looking at something similar. Most development work moving to the LLM abstraction level, with the skills being writing good prompts, managing the context window, agents, memories and so on. Some developers will be able to examine LLM generated code and spot problems there, but most will not have that skill. I'm not sure how to feel about it. Since ChatGPT showed up and until a couple months ago, I was firmly skeptical of LLM programming. We had new models every few weeks and I felt like each new model is just a different twist on the same low quality slop output. But recently the models seem to have crossed some threshold where their capabilities really improved and I have now used Claude - still using it sparingly - to implement features in much less time than I'd need myself or to locate a bug based on just log output. I don't yet buy the "coding is solved" hype but we're at least looking at the biggest change to programming since the adoption of high-level programming languages.
- archagon 6mo ago
  AI is not an abstraction layer — no more than paying contractors is an “abstraction” over writing the code yourself.

apricot 6mo ago

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 taught them about assembly language and told them about the registers, instructions, and addressing modes of the chip, memory map and monitor routines of the Apple, and after that we went and wrote a few programs together, mostly using the low-resolution graphics mode (40x40): a drawing program, a bouncing ball, culminating in hand-rolled sprites with simple collision detection. Their assignment is to write a simple program (I suggested a low-res game like Snake or Tetris but they can do whatever they want provided they tell me about it and I okay it), demo their program, and then explain to the class how it works. At first they hated the line editor. But then a very interesting thing happened. They started thinking about their code before writing it. Planning. Discussing things in advance. Everything we told them they should do before coding in previous classes, but they didn't do because a powerful editor was right there so why not use it?... And then they started to get used to the line editor. They told me they didn't need to really see the code on the screen, it was in their head. They will of course go back to modern tools after class is finished, but I think it's good for them to have this kind of experience.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
flawn 6mo ago
Is this course online available? Sounds like great fun.
ssgodderidge 6mo ago
Whoa, I didn’t know such an thing existed. What emulator do you use?
- apricot 6mo ago
  AppleWin, and the assembler is an early version of Glen Bredon's Merlin.

abcde666777 6mo ago

Personally I haven't stopped doing things the old way. I haven't had any issues using LLMs as rubber ducks or brain storming assistants - they can be particularly useful for identifying algorithms which might solve a given problem you're unfamiliar with. Basically a variant on google searching. But when it comes to the final act I find myself unwilling to let an LLM write the actual code - I still do it myself. Perhaps because my main project at the moment is a game I've been working on for four years, so the codebase is sizable, non-trivial, and all written by me. My strong sense even since coding LLMs showed up has been that continuing to write the code is important for keeping it coherent and manageable as a whole, including my mental model of it. And also: for keeping myself happy working on it. The enjoyment would be gone if I leaned that far into LLMs.

bschwindHN 6mo ago
I'm in the same boat. LLMs help with some research and idea bouncing, and then I write all the code myself. Despite what some might say, there isn't a big moat between those who use LLMs for programming and those who don't. So if I ever truly need to use LLMs to survive, I'll just have to start paying for a subscription. In the meantime, I'll be keeping my own skills sharp and see how that turns out in a few years. I'm afraid software quality is going to take a nosedive in the near future, it was already on a downward trend.

fsckboy 6mo ago

how about the whole thing was written by an AI as satire, mocking human "coding retreat"

epx 6mo ago

It is all a conspiracy, now that mechanical keyboards are affordable and available and so many shapes and switches, they want to take this last pleasure (typing) from us

bschwindHN 6mo ago
Right?? I've gotten into mechanical keyboards quite a lot the past few years and it has totally made development and writing more enjoyable. Not giving that up any time soon.

serbrech 6mo ago

Should have LLM providers create stack overflow type of site based on user’s most asked problem. At least we won’t deplete de source of normal searches results.

dang 6mo ago

[stub for offtopicness] (I swapped the title for the subtitle earlier because I thought it was more informative. What I missed was the flamebaity effect that "the old way" would have. Obvious in hindsight!)

sho_hn 6mo ago
Remember the old days of our youth, i.e. last week Monday, when we still wrote code by hand?
- phoronixrly 6mo ago
  I can't tell if OP is satire... I've just seen so many unhiged takes that this article reads completely in line with the discourse...
  - tayo42 6mo ago
    Taking 3 months off from work to do program some basic stuff is already kind of disconnected from reality.
- justonceokay 6mo ago
  Well when the fashions change, the old ways are “old fashioned” but only literally
edjgeek 6mo ago
[flagged]
SrslyJosh 6mo ago
> "coding the old way" You mean the way that the majority of code is still written by professionals?
- sayYayToLife 6mo ago
  [dead]

mindcrime 6mo ago

I'm a big advocate for AI, including GenAI. But I still spend a fair amount of time coding by hand, or "by hand + Copilot completions enabled". And yes, I will use spec driven development with SpecKit + OpenCode, or just straight up "vibe code" on occasion but so far I am unwilling to abdicate my responsibility to understand code and abandon the knowledge of how to write it. Heck, I even bought a couple of new LISP and Java books lately to bone up on various corners of those respectively. And I got a couple of Forth books before that. Not planning to stop coding completely for a while, if ever.

scarface_74 6mo ago
My responsibility is to make sure my code meets functional and non functional requirements. It’s to understand the *behavior*. My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that. Someone thought I was naive when I said my vibe coded internal web admin site met the security requirements without looking at a line of code. I knew that because the requirements were that anyone who had access to the site could do anything on the site and the site was secured with Amazon Cognito credentials and the Lambda that served it had a least privileged role attached. If either of those invariants were broken, Claude has found a major AWS vulnerability.
- sgarland 6mo ago
  Did you mean to reply to someone else? This seems awfully defensive for a reply to parent’s comment.
  - imtringued 6mo ago
    Yeah only the first two sentences were actually relevant. The rest was a humble brag that there is no application level security, which is a really weird thing to brag about. When I use SAML, I still have to check that the user has some sort of attribute that indicates that access was granted to the application. If this access rule is defined outside the application, then why bring up Claude? If it isn't then Claude is responsible for implementing the access rule, which means the comment is 100% wrong.

beej71 6mo ago

I'll bet we see more and more of this in the future. As developer skills atrophy due to over-reliance on LLMs, we'll have to keep our skills sharp somehow. What better way than a sabbatical?

linzhangrun 6mo ago
[flagged]
bendmorris 6mo ago
To answer "what better way," clearly using the skills regularly is much better. Letting them atrophy for potentially multiple years and then trying to resurrect them repeatedly doesn't seem like a recipe for maintaining sharp skills to me.
- beej71 6mo ago
  That's definitely optimal, but I don't think a lot of people are going to have that opportunity. It's not really in the short-term interest of a company to have people spending time on that.

temporallobe 6mo ago

The very first few years of my career I spent writing code (mostly Perl) in vi (not even vim) on a SPARC running Solaris. I bought myself the O’Riley Perl Cookbook and that was pretty much my sole guide apart from the few internet forums that were available at the time. Search engines were still primitive, so getting help when you got stuck was far more difficult. But it forced me to deeply learn a lot of things - Perl syntax (we had no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) terminal tools, and especially vi keystrokes. Looking back, there was far less distraction and “noise”, though I admit that could have been the fact that it was the beginning of my career and expectations were lower. I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex.

andsoitis 6mo ago
> I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex. For me it was GW-BASIC and no editor as we know them today. That was instant gratification, rapid development, no silly layers. It was pretty pure. It is what hooked me. In a sense, agentic coding, has brought back the excitement to building software for me because I don’t have to wrangle all the crazy enterprise or other modern development considerations directly. There’s a closer connection between thought and result, which is what was the magic that captured my imagination.

fouronnes3 6mo ago

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 with LLM training? Like what is the 1MB of text data that if I insert it into the training set harms LLM training performance the most?

inerte 6mo ago
> Can you design text data specifically to mess with LLM training? Maybe text that costs a LOT of tokens. Very, very verbose. I think if there are rules and on the internet, LLMs can eventually figure it out, so you have to make it expensive. Another way would be to go offline. Never write it down, only talk about it at least 50 meters away from your phone. Transmitted through memory and whisper.
mswphd 6mo ago
LLM's train in some standardized ways to emit things like tool calls, right? if you make those tokens a fundamental part of your programming language, it's possible you'd be able to run into tokenizer bugs that make LLMs much more annoying to use. Pure conjecture though.
dougiejones 6mo ago
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.
- andsoitis 6mo ago
  I thought about it, and had ideas like function -> fuck and throw -> shit. But I think humans would actually find it more distracting and unpleasant than an LLM would because we are more affected by social and emotional norms. Maybe there’s another way…
6mo ago

sph 6mo ago

This title is the most depressing thing I have read on this site

tikotus 6mo ago
I had to see if it was a joke. Oh, my.
zombot 6mo ago
And this is only the beginning. Wait until they send you to the insane asylum for talking about coding by hand.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- pydry 6mo ago
  There is a pretty intense campaign to shift the overton window around coding where anchoring is used repeatedly. When Jensen Huang says you need to spend $500k on tokens per developer per year he knows it will be perceived as bullshit, but by setting such a high he's subtly making spending $0 seem abnormal and irrational. This article does the same thing. It's the same reason most companies have an ultra deluxe $150 /month plan nobody buys.
Remdo 6mo ago
I thought Hacker News was a place where you could share your views and discuss them with different people, but your comment seems to show that it now became a Facebook comment section. Thank you for your eye-opening contribution.
- orphea 6mo ago
  Well, they did share their view and it's being discussed, so what's the problem?
  - 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago

joewongg 6mo ago

[dead]

kolleykibber 6mo ago

Crazy to think this headline would have been satire a year ago.

myst 6mo ago

I hope this is some kind of fiction. Certainly reads this way.

huflungdung 6mo ago

[dead]

elAhmo 6mo ago

It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.

stingraycharles 6mo ago
It worries me that I’m losing my muscle memory, especially for the new technologies and programming languages I have been working with over the past year (as it’s suddenly so much easier to get shit done), and I feel like I’m creating a knowledge debt as I go. I’m very concerned about how the next generation of software engineers will pick up deep knowledge about this stuff, if at all.
armchairhacker 6mo ago
“Writing by hand” two years ago is analogous to writing without an IDE, which was rare.
andersmurphy 6mo ago
The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end. I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.
- Hrun0 6mo ago
  YC startups still have to be open source though, right?
  - elAhmo 6mo ago
    Where did you get that impression? Most aren’t
    - Hrun0 6mo ago
      I was under the impression that YC startups need to be open source. My bad!

sergiopreira 6mo ago

[dead]

yodsanklai 6mo ago

> so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way the old way which is about one year ago?

derwiki 6mo ago
I mean ya, management at my company has made it clear that all of our code should be written by agents. So yea, things have changed a lot in a year.
- 6031769 6mo ago
  Please come back in a year and tell us how that has worked out for them.
- teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
  How embarrassing for them.

assimpleaspossi 6mo ago

>>ai is here. so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way The old way?! So not using AI is already being called "the old way"?!! That statement sends alarm bells off about writing on the internet and trust to be put into it as if I'm the first one to notice it.

bertil 6mo ago
People were still writing code by hand three months ago…

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

octagons 6mo ago

I think the author’s intent is well-placed, but it does feel a bit sad that this subject is blog-worthy. I’ve spent a lifetime teaching myself programming, computers, and engineering. I have no formal education in these disciplines and find that I excel due to the self-taught nature of my background. I take a very metered approach to AI and use it for autocomplete while still scrutinizing every token (not the AI kind) as well as an augment to my self-pedagogy. It’s great to be able to “query” or get a summary from a set of technical documents on demand. However, I don’t understand the desire to remove oneself from the process with AI. I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills. There’s more to engineering than simply programming. Both the engineer and the intended user base must also understand the system. The value lost is greater than the sum of all the parts when an LLM produces most or all of the code.

pretzel5297 6mo ago
> I simply don’t do anything that won’t teach me something new or improve my existing skills. Not trying to be rude but you either must not be a professional software engineer or your skill level isn't that high yet. You simply cannot always do things that teach you new skills or improve existing ones. In any sufficiently complex project, even the most novel ones, you'll do things you've done many times before.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  I'm a bit skeptical too, but I can understand his points. Most of what is rote is probably written somewhere and if you have a library of code and snippets (including the existing project), it's easy to copy and adapt it. And that activity is very inducing to flow state, so you don't mind the time spent.
- octagons 6mo ago
  I’m not a software engineer. Most of my work these days focuses on microcontroller exploitation. I have 15 years of professional experience as a security consultant/contractor.
- t43562 6mo ago

JAG_Ecalona 6mo ago

[dead]

ironman1478 6mo ago

I didn't realize how I learned to develop software from 2011-2015 was the old way lol. (Am I old now?). I appreciate that the author understands why doing everything "the old way" is good. AI is a tool, it can't be a replacement for how you think and it can't be a replacement for the actual work. I wish more people had a desire for the inner workings of things because it makes you better at actually using tools. Implementing compilers, databases, OSes, control systems, etc. is like practicing swimming. Yeah, you might not ever swim again but when you need to the muscle memory will be there when you need to get out of the ocean (I know this is a strained metaphor). Knowing more can only be a boon to using LLMs for coding and it's really a general problem in ML. I work in a science field as hw / sw engineer and I've seen so many pure data science people say they can replace all our work with a model, flail for 2 years and then their whole org gets canned. If they just read a textbook or collaborated (which they never do, no matter how polite you are), they'd have been able to leverage their data science skills to build something great and instead they just toil away never making it past step 0.

KaiShips 6mo ago

[flagged]

whateveracct 6mo ago

i feel like i'm being gaslit into believing that coding was ever hard or the bottleneck. Typing and thinking in English is demonstrably slower than in code/the abstract (Haskell for me.) And no, I didn't write English plans before AI. Or have a stream of English thought in my head. Or even pronounce code as I read and wrote it. That's low-skill stuff.

booleandilemma 6mo ago
It's the opposite. Coding was, and is, still hard. If you don't believe me go do an Advent of Code challenge after day 15. LLMs have tricked everyone into believing coding is easy.
- whateveracct 6mo ago
  I'm confused though. I have never like spent hours at a time coding at my job or side projects. And yet I keep building stuff.. I tried LLMs because of AI fomo by my CEO. "Opus 4.whatever is a stepwise improvement - I am convinced all coders who don't go all-in on AI will be obsolete soon." Multiple times I tried. Every time Claude creates crap and I have to spend a bunch of time correcting it in a loop. Or basically scripting it. And it's like..I never spent this much time thinking or actively working before. So I'm back to being natty and I am delivering more and have more time during the workday to spend with my wife and kid and video games etc.

andai 6mo ago

From the linked article by Cal Newport: > One solution to this constant companion problem: Spend more time with your phone out of easy reach. If it’s not nearby, it won’t be as likely to trigger your motivational neurons, helping clear your brain to focus on other activities with less distraction. Reminds me of this study: "The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance" The effect persisted even when the phone was switched off. It only went away when the phone was moved to a different part of the building. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

bustah 6mo ago

[flagged]

wkjagt 6mo ago

I left big tech about 5 years ago, which was an interesting timing looking back. It's not even that long ago, but man have things completely changed since then. I still code a lot, but only for fun. I've never even tried agentic coding. I'm kinda sad that "coding the old way" (as what this apparently is now) has become obsolete so quickly, but also very grateful that I was coincidentally born at the right time to have lived through a good chunk of time where people still wrote code themselves.

ofjcihen 6mo ago

Anecdotally I found that it was very easy to just throw everything at the LLM. That was fine until I realized once I got stuck that I was basically lost. It only took 2 weeks for years of knowledge to feel very “foreign”. Recently I’ve been trying to combat this by learning things “deeper” IE. yes I can secure and respond to container based threats but how do containers actually work deep down? So far I think it’s working well and as an odd plus it’s actually helping me use AI more efficiently when I need to.

animanoir 6mo ago

[dead]

Unsponsoredio 6mo ago

the cal newport quote in the post is doing a lot of work. the strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout. fine, but the gym analogy breaks down somewhere. in a gym, the person who actually lifts heavier gets noticed. in software, the person with the right bio and the right network gets noticed, regardless of whether they've ever lifted anything real. you can spend three years learning compilers properly and have a handful of readers. someone else ships a wrapper on a saturday and lands a pmarca quote tweet by monday. coding the old way is good for you. i'm not convinced it's what gets you noticed. the strain was never really what got rewarded in the first place.

LittleBox 6mo ago
I agree with you sentiment although I disagree with the sentence > coding the old way is good for you. i'm not convinced it's what gets you noticed. You won’t go completely unnoticed if you’re good at your job but you can only be noticed from your deliverables, which is a slow process. You can buff up your presence by talking about it a lot, yes, but you won’t get 0 attention for hard work.
- Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
  [dead]

CivBase 6mo ago

I strongly believe that code should always be subjected to review before entering production. This does a few things: 1. It increases the chances of any bugs being found and resolved. 2. It encourages the author to be more careful with their code to avoid long reviews with a lot of findings. 3. It ensures at least two people - the author and approverd - have familiarity with the code. 4. It spreads responsibility for the code across at least two people - the author and approvers. It's clear this article's author does not review their own code. I sure hope that code is not used for anything important.