5 ms·

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

walt_grata 3mo ago
I write code by hand every day. I do the main part of the feature implementation myself and leave comments for the code i want the agent to write. I have some skills and a command that sets the stage to get the agent to fill in the rest
dofm 3mo ago
I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?
- andai 3mo ago
  Worst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    The open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane. I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
- estearum 3mo ago
  > That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness. The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      "Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.
      - Arainach 3mo ago
        On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
        michaelchisari 3mo ago
        And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
    - pydry 3mo ago
      Nobody cares about code quality /s They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
- vidarh 3mo ago
  Personally I use 5 different model families, 3 of which are open weights with 3rd party inference providers (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi), so if the frontier labs were to shut down it'd be a nuisance, nothing more.
- jenniferhooley 3mo ago
  Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned. It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    To what extent does that ameliorate the problem? Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
    - jenniferhooley 3mo ago
      No. Anyone who doesn't code with AI - while retaining a deep knowledge and understanding of the problem domain - is falling behind. I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it. Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up. One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance. So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people. I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages. However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain. Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back. I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time. You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.
andai 3mo ago
I force myself to do it at least once a week, you know, like cardio. Keeps the doctor away.
- dofm 3mo ago
  Picard should have been a bergamot grower, not a winemaker.
Ronsenshi 3mo ago
I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.
- hirako2000 3mo ago
  You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    This is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences. Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.
    - hirako2000 3mo ago
      Nothing new under the sun though. It's the barista-brication of the tech field. No crafting skills, to make anyone replaceable. We saw it before AI. See ServiceNow university, teaching tailored abilities to run as technical consultant, for ServiceNow. That way good luck transitioning.
  - Ronsenshi 3mo ago
    That's just business owners and C-suite pocketing the difference while they fire staff and replacing it with AI. At some point somebody would have to start asking "business" some tough questions.
    - hirako2000 3mo ago
      They are firing artisans for cheaper labor who just use AI. They aren't replacing people with AI that's a fallacy.
AlotOfReading 3mo ago
Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive. Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
- qup 3mo ago
  Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
  - twister2920 3mo ago
    "more good" seems like a pretty decent definition of better to me. The words you are looking for are "cheaper" and "faster"
    - qup 3mo ago
      In coding we usually change it to "cheap, fast or correct: choose two" I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    Are you perhaps missing the true message of that aphorism? Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - AlotOfReading 3mo ago
    "good" can take lots of different meanings. Generally though, I want as little code as I can get away with. A majority of code lifecycle cost isn't in writing it.
  - wavemode 3mo ago
    Huh? The word "better" is the comparative form of the adjective "good". Or did you misunderstand the comment you're replying to?
LastTrain 3mo ago
I still write code and sometimes it works well. I also use Claude and it writes code and sometimes that goes well. We have better success together, where I do the interesting stuff and let Claude write my unit tests, reconcile my documentation. That is to say, I’m using it for quality not quantity. There aren’t enough humans to deploy or consume all the sloppy shit it could write on its own.
csomar 3mo ago
I am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.
- techpression 3mo ago
  This is quite terrifying to me, because I have a feeling I will soon come to the same conclusion. I’m starting to see some really glaring omissions in code I’m responsible for (using Opus) that at first (and second) look seemed fine, but really isn’t.
  - csomar 3mo ago
    I talked with a friend on a different field (academic) and he had to re-review all things written by AI. Basically, he used AI to read/summarize/find stuff in large academic papers but realized later that many times AI makes glaring mistakes that on a first read pass the smell test.
  - gopher_space 3mo ago
    From my perspective it felt like understanding that the machine has no desires helped refine my usage. I can ask it to be curious, and it will reply with what people think curiosity should look like, but it’s a simulation of an emotion it will never be driven by. The ramifications become apparent when you engage in activity like cross-domain discovery.
kelnos 3mo ago
Yes, nearly all of it. Having the agent write code for me doesn't really save me much time, and the code quality is usually worse (and it takes even more time if I insist on better code quality from the agent). And I don't think I'm unique. I see enough posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 pop up that I'm reasonably confident all the hype around LLMs saving so much time and increasing productivity so much is, well, just that: hype. Sure, if you can't code at all and want to build something, an LLM is going to be great for you, even if you can't evaluate the code quality or determine if there are bugs just by looking at the code. But I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and as a hobby since I was like 8 years old. I like to code! It's a passion of mine. If the LLM isn't doing it faster or better (and most of the time it isn't), why wouldn't I write code myself? I'll have the LLM write boilerplate stuff or do tedious refactoring, because I just don't feel like it (even if it does take longer). But for the real work? Of course I do most of it myself. One area where the LLM shines for me is finding the root causes of bugs. It can generally do that much faster than I do. Often orders of magnitude faster (like minutes instead of hours or days). But when it comes to write the fix for the bug? It's usually faster and better if I do it myself.
- dofm 3mo ago
  I am more fully invested in finding out ways AI can support me (documentation, code analysis, bughunting), though my experience with Claude as a bughunter is that it can miss the absolutely obvious if it is not in the shape it is expecting. More generally I am interested in burnout-avoidance tools; things that help me start, finish, things that write tests I guess, certainly code scaffolding. But I am fully unconvinced that my burnout will be improved by ending up owning the responsibility for wobbly or inscrutable AI-generated code with potential landmines in it; that will keep me up at night just the same.

I write code by hand every day. I do the main part of the feature implementation myself and leave comments for the code i want the agent to write. I have some skills and a command that sets the stage to get the agent to fill in the rest

dofm 3mo ago

I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?

andai 3mo ago
Worst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.
- dofm 3mo ago
  The open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane. I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
estearum 3mo ago
> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness. The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
- dofm 3mo ago
  I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    "Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.
    - Arainach 3mo ago
      On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.
      - michaelchisari 3mo ago
        And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.
  - pydry 3mo ago
    Nobody cares about code quality /s They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
vidarh 3mo ago
Personally I use 5 different model families, 3 of which are open weights with 3rd party inference providers (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi), so if the frontier labs were to shut down it'd be a nuisance, nothing more.
jenniferhooley 3mo ago
Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned. It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.
- dofm 3mo ago
  To what extent does that ameliorate the problem? Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
  - jenniferhooley 3mo ago
    No. Anyone who doesn't code with AI - while retaining a deep knowledge and understanding of the problem domain - is falling behind. I hate to say this tbh, I loved hand-writing code. I made a great living for 20 years, and I absolutely loved it and was quite good at it. Hand-typing code is just slower now; there’s no two-ways about it. You are either going to be slow and a bad hire for businesses, or you figure out how to adopt AI into your workflow to speed up. One thing I think people don't realize is that deep knowledge of programming, performance, architectural, and domain specific trade-offs makes a skilled engineer about 1000X faster than someone without those skills -with AI. But yes, now unskilled people can actually make apps/software. They just tend to be slow, and their products are full of bugs, security flaws, and abysmal performance. So we went from: Skills = can or cannot ship any software at all. Now we are at: Skills = can ship better software much faster than unskilled people. I was actually faced with this recently. I decided to learn Rust and port one of my side projects to it. Initially, I moved extremely slowly, and the AI made truly horrific architectural decisions because I didn't have the knowledge of how to direct it, especially compared to my primary languages. However, once I gained a firm grasp of Rust, I was better able to properly direct the AI to fix fundamental issues and architect things properly. My speed increase multiplier proved to be directly proportional to my growing knowledge of both the language and the domain. Skill and knowledge combined with AI, when used appropriately, absolutely multiply your speed and quality. I really think once you understand what AI can do, and how to utilize it to produce better code, faster than before, there truly is no going back. I'm finding a path forward that I actually enjoy now and don't really see losing my value (no telling how things will change in the future), I can have more time to focus on really quality/solid/performant and useful systems with less time just typing one character out at a time. You could have talked to me 3 months ago and I'd never imagine I'd say the above btw. I REALLY enjoyed code writing and earlier AI models without harnesses were pretty useless for anyone skilled at development. Now with stuff like deepseek Flash I feel like I have a happy medium of 100% directed/fast code turnaround, less typing, more deep focus on architecture, systems, and the actual end product.

andai 3mo ago

I force myself to do it at least once a week, you know, like cardio. Keeps the doctor away.

dofm 3mo ago
Picard should have been a bergamot grower, not a winemaker.

Ronsenshi 3mo ago

I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.

hirako2000 3mo ago
You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.
- dofm 3mo ago
  This is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences. Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.
  - hirako2000 3mo ago
    Nothing new under the sun though. It's the barista-brication of the tech field. No crafting skills, to make anyone replaceable. We saw it before AI. See ServiceNow university, teaching tailored abilities to run as technical consultant, for ServiceNow. That way good luck transitioning.
- Ronsenshi 3mo ago
  That's just business owners and C-suite pocketing the difference while they fire staff and replacing it with AI. At some point somebody would have to start asking "business" some tough questions.
  - hirako2000 3mo ago
    They are firing artisans for cheaper labor who just use AI. They aren't replacing people with AI that's a fallacy.

AlotOfReading 3mo ago

Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive. Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.

qup 3mo ago
Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
- twister2920 3mo ago
  "more good" seems like a pretty decent definition of better to me. The words you are looking for are "cheaper" and "faster"
  - qup 3mo ago
    In coding we usually change it to "cheap, fast or correct: choose two" I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.
- dofm 3mo ago
  Are you perhaps missing the true message of that aphorism? Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- AlotOfReading 3mo ago
  "good" can take lots of different meanings. Generally though, I want as little code as I can get away with. A majority of code lifecycle cost isn't in writing it.
- wavemode 3mo ago
  Huh? The word "better" is the comparative form of the adjective "good". Or did you misunderstand the comment you're replying to?

LastTrain 3mo ago

I still write code and sometimes it works well. I also use Claude and it writes code and sometimes that goes well. We have better success together, where I do the interesting stuff and let Claude write my unit tests, reconcile my documentation. That is to say, I’m using it for quality not quantity. There aren’t enough humans to deploy or consume all the sloppy shit it could write on its own.

csomar 3mo ago

I am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.

techpression 3mo ago
This is quite terrifying to me, because I have a feeling I will soon come to the same conclusion. I’m starting to see some really glaring omissions in code I’m responsible for (using Opus) that at first (and second) look seemed fine, but really isn’t.
- csomar 3mo ago
  I talked with a friend on a different field (academic) and he had to re-review all things written by AI. Basically, he used AI to read/summarize/find stuff in large academic papers but realized later that many times AI makes glaring mistakes that on a first read pass the smell test.
- gopher_space 3mo ago
  From my perspective it felt like understanding that the machine has no desires helped refine my usage. I can ask it to be curious, and it will reply with what people think curiosity should look like, but it’s a simulation of an emotion it will never be driven by. The ramifications become apparent when you engage in activity like cross-domain discovery.

kelnos 3mo ago

Yes, nearly all of it. Having the agent write code for me doesn't really save me much time, and the code quality is usually worse (and it takes even more time if I insist on better code quality from the agent). And I don't think I'm unique. I see enough posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 pop up that I'm reasonably confident all the hype around LLMs saving so much time and increasing productivity so much is, well, just that: hype. Sure, if you can't code at all and want to build something, an LLM is going to be great for you, even if you can't evaluate the code quality or determine if there are bugs just by looking at the code. But I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and as a hobby since I was like 8 years old. I like to code! It's a passion of mine. If the LLM isn't doing it faster or better (and most of the time it isn't), why wouldn't I write code myself? I'll have the LLM write boilerplate stuff or do tedious refactoring, because I just don't feel like it (even if it does take longer). But for the real work? Of course I do most of it myself. One area where the LLM shines for me is finding the root causes of bugs. It can generally do that much faster than I do. Often orders of magnitude faster (like minutes instead of hours or days). But when it comes to write the fix for the bug? It's usually faster and better if I do it myself.

dofm 3mo ago
I am more fully invested in finding out ways AI can support me (documentation, code analysis, bughunting), though my experience with Claude as a bughunter is that it can miss the absolutely obvious if it is not in the shape it is expecting. More generally I am interested in burnout-avoidance tools; things that help me start, finish, things that write tests I guess, certainly code scaffolding. But I am fully unconvinced that my burnout will be improved by ending up owning the responsibility for wobbly or inscrutable AI-generated code with potential landmines in it; that will keep me up at night just the same.