I'm going back to writing code by hand

archleaf

So what you really mean is you are going to do better and more detailed skills files so you can get an architecture that you've thought through rather than something random?

gjvc

have another drink and drive yourself home

binyu

> I'm rewriting k10s in Rust. Not because Rust is better but, because it's the language I can steer. I've written enough of it to feel when something's wrong before I can articulate why. That instinct is the one thing vibe-coding can't replace. The AI hands you plausible-looking code. You need a nose for when it's garbage. Isn't Golang relatively easier to read than Rust? I was under the impression that Rust is a more complex language syntactically. > The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. The architecture decisions that the AI kept making wrong are now made in writing before the first prompt. This post is good to grasp the difference between "vibe-coding" and using the AI to help with design and architectural choices done by a competent programmer (I am not saying you are not one). Lately I feel that Opus 4.7 involves the user a lot more, even when given a prompt to one-shot a particular piece of software.

erelong

Can't you just ask AI to break up large files into smaller ones and also explain how the code works so you can understand it, instead of start over from scratch?

epec254

Not sure if just me, but this post feels AI written?

mpurbo

Strict SDD might help to constrain and harness the process.

AIorNot

This doesnt make much sense the article itself is AI written It would have been easy to run a few ai agents to review the code and find these issues as well and architect it clearly

keithnz

AI writes what you ask it to write, you need to talk to it about architecture. You should have an architecture doc so AI can shape the code based on that, you can get the AI to make the architecture doc also. If using claude you can use the software architecture mode for this.

xantronix

So you're not actually writing code by hand? I'm very confused by the difference between the title and the conclusion here.

nothinkjustai

Writing code by hand is an oxymoron. You don’t write code with AI, AI doesn’t write, it generates.

apt-apt-apt-apt

Outright lie clickbait. As he states himself, he's doing the design work by hand, and will likely still use AI to write code.

EMM_386

You don't need to go back to coding by hand if you know how to do it already. There is a middle ground. If you understand good software architecture, architect it. Create a markdown document just as you would if you had a team of engineers working with you and would hand off to them. Be specific. Let the AI do the implementation of your architecture.

kypro

> I learned over these 7 months 7 months ago was early November. Coding assistants were getting very good back then, but they were still significantly poorer at making good architectural decisions in my experience. They tended to just force features into the existing code base without much thought or care. Today I've noticed assistants tend to spot architectural smells while working and will ask you whether they should try to address it, but even then they're probably never going to suggest a full refactor of the codebase (which probably is generally the correct heuristic). My guess is that if you built this today with AI that you wouldn't run into so many of these problems. That's not to say you should build blind, but the first thing that stood out to me was that you starting building 7 months ago and coding assistants were only just becoming decent at that time, and undirected would still generally generate total slop.

shahbaby

This reads too much like it was LLM generated. I can't say for sure if it was but I have an allergic reaction to the short snappy know-it-all LLM writing style.

plastic041

Title says > back to writing code by hand But what they are doing is > doing the __design work__ myself, by hand, before any code gets written. So... Claude still is generating the code I guess? And seriously, I can't understand that they thought their vibe coded project works fine and even bought a domain for the project without ever looking at source code it generated, FOR 7 MONTHS??

ipaddr

When he mentions I push commits at work for as long as my tokens last I can understand that. Managing tokens has become an important skill.

photochemsyn

Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly? Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have never paid for a compiler. This whole investor bubble will blow up in the face of the rentier-finance capitalists and I’ll be laughing my head off while it happens.

snowe2010

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it does allow that but you realize some other small issue you never accounted for. I do not know how you can write this article and not realize the problem is the AI. Not that you let it architect, but that you weren’t paying attention to every single thing it does. It’s a glorified code generator. You need to be checking every thing it does. The hard part of software engineering was never writing code. Junior devs know how to write code. The hard part is everything else.

Decabytes

We should go back to designing UML diagrams for programs before we write them /s

imperio59

Alternate title: "I did not understand the current limitations of AI and assumed it could do large software design and it generated spaghetti slop" Yea, that's why engineers are still very important for now (until models can do this type of longer term designs and stick to them).