I'm going back to coding by hand
I have a successful app I built myself with a solid user base. I had been working on a new version via Claude on and off for about six months In work we use LLMs exclusively. Nobody writes code anymore. It's all hands off and we have a high level understanding of how things work but no more than that. When it comes to my side project, I was adding features at breakneck speed with Claude but I realized I have no clue how the new code works or what it changes or breaks. I spent many years of my life working on this project and I don't want to turn it into another vibe coded black box, especially without an org of other engineers to help. So last night, I abandoned my Claude branch with all the fancy new things and started hand coding again. It was very very satisfying. Sure, there was monotony. I changed some variable names and I had to chase down all the places they were referenced, comment out tons of stuff to get things working and then slowly bring it back in, but it felt like coming home to an untidy house after living in hotels for half a year, and starting to clean up. Yeah there's work to do, but this place is mine. My own. I know where things live. It's given me love and energy for the project again (at least for now, I hope it continues!) and I'm delighted to say I took a good look at code I myself had written pre Claude and I still found many ways to write it better, refactor, make it more readable and efficient. I haven't forgotten. If anyone is feeling the despair of not coding anymore, stairs you're losing your edge, I would suggest you ditch Claude for a few days at least and see how you feel. Your mileage may vary, but it's given me back something I thought was gone forever
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
dphender
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.
conartist6
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
yoz-y
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.
abstractspoon
Goog for you!
dudewhocodes
Welcome back and godspeed.
sgbeal
> 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' \{} \;
sfn42
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.
aatd86
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.
spottedmarley
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"?
rf15
Did the same. First few days was like learning to walk from scratch again. Welcome back, programmer.
pulkas
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.
rajeasy
not going to easy after using agentic ai, as mind get used to it .not easy but best of luck.
dunefox
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.
huurtehoog
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.
ramank775
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.
prplfsh
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.
Chester2002
i think its important to do that as you might lose your skills if you only use AI!
sejje
All the stuff you did by hand, you could do with AI. You're not forced to abstract your way into not understanding your own product.
lolakutty
I never left, because I knew for a fact that this, what you describe, would be the ultimate eventuality.