Coding used to be fun when in use to write things by hand, the complete project mental model was always used to there in mind. With LLM output has increased but that end to end mental model is lost. Nowadays I look for smaller tasks which doesn't touch multiple things and use them as treat to do my hand.

I still make time to write code by hand.

But I think it's really about finding the right abstraction. As a staff or principle engineer in the beforetimes, I also didn't understand most of the code being written by the org. I dove in where needed, but more importantly I found the right layer to understand what was going on - dependencies between teams and services, data flows and data models, etc. And where I found myself most effective was when I was shaping and understanding those effectively.

Unfortunately I can't do that. My projects are too big now. In fact, this is how I deal with projects: I build the base manually and then I can iterate with AI faster once the fundamentals are solid. Sometimes the AI tends to forget those fundamentals or tries to change those and add unnecessary stuff on top. If I stay invested in what the AI is doing, I can usually spot it and nudge the AI back to sanity.

That is how I think it should be done.

It's the difference between doing something and asking for something to be done.

Forget all the technology involved. One of them is yours, you made it and know it. The other one is something you bought.

Quite literally, something phoned in.

I'm not. I just don't want to implement code for reading files, setting up and population databases, logs, etc. manually anymore. I want to automate boilerplate, the occasional frontend code, etc. and focus on the parts that are interesting for me. This way I can get things done that I wouldn't otherwise.

Did the same. First few days was like learning to walk from scratch again. Welcome back, programmer.

i think its important to do that as you might lose your skills if you only use AI!

> I changed some variable names and I had to chase down all the places they were referenced,

   $ find . -name '*.c' -exec perl -i -pe 's/\btheOldName\b/theNewName/g' \{} \;

Welcome back and godspeed.

Power to you!

I started building a Claude which retains some brain power. After each pass it ablates a function or a portion of code and forces you to write it out by hand. My hope is that I can get something that deals with boilerplate and makes me focus on the interesting stuff. We'll see.

not going to easy after using agentic ai, as mind get used to it .not easy but best of luck.

Welcome back! Despite all the prophecies of doom and gloom, little has changed.

You can still very much get ahead by working smarter not harder, even when working with your hands

Goog for you!

It's a common complaint that people lose control of their codebase using LLMs. It always strikes me as odd, because this is a choice you make when you use the tool.

You don't have to just give it a task, let it do whatever it wants, then accept the result. You can tell it how to do things. You can read the changes. You can ask it to do things differently.

You choose to relinquish all control and then complain that you don't like not being in control. It's all about the level of involvement you choose for yourself. It's not all or nothing, you don't have to go full vibe coder it's a spectrum and you choose where you want to be on that spectrum.

If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed, coding by hand probably makes more sense. At least it keeps your brain engaged.

But the right move is to find a way to increase the rate at which you generate ideas and offload the coding almost entirely to AI. Because if you’re not doing that, someone else is. They’ll eventually build something better than your app.

And when people stop choosing your product, if you can’t come up with the next idea and this is your only source of income... well, good luck.

Plug Claude back into your cleaned up codebase.. Its performance may surprise you once again. Maybe the trick to keep our sanity is LLM only on the odd days of the week.

The debate bothers me. Why anyone feels they need to only code one way or the other is strange. I do both. Actually, there are three options: By hand, hands off, and AI assistance while you code by hand. I'll do any of the three depending on what Im building or how I feel. Why does it have to be a hard line "Im not using AI anymore" or "I have to use AI for everything"?