Writing code by hand is over, forever

binary132

I don’t care, I’m still gonna do it

luxuryballs

until the model is unavailable

steele

Deleting code by hand will thrive

duhhhhh1212

https://www.pangram.com/history/9beb9917-9686-4679-ac4d-5182... Don’t waste your time. I hope these hyperbolic takes can be over, forever.

echoangle

The plot labeled “Incoming bug reports over the same period.” is funny. Where does the red line come from, except arbitrarily setting 20 and 15 bug reports and plotting that? There’s no discernible connection to the actual data.

meowface

I question the epistemology of people who did not realize this by around late-2024. (Sonnet 3.5 was out and could do some things okay.) It's defensible to say "October 2026 is not yet the time when we should be 100% deferring code writing to AI (let alone not even looking at the code any longer)". But the writing is very obviously on the wall. It's likely not going to take longer than 10 years.

DonaldPShimoda

So many of these pro-AI articles lean on references to "people used to be scared of calculators!" and the like, but it's a nonsense comparison. Calculators weren't predicated on monetizing prior work at the cost of devaluing future work. Functioning calculators are at least as accurate as a human, generally more so, and they do not produce incorrect outputs when given correct inputs no matter what. And calculators don't lie to you about what they've done, even if the result will make you sad. The comparison doesn't hold up. (Also, I think some of the concerns about calculators at those times actually were valid, even though I wouldn't argue that society should not have adopted their use.)

AustinDev

Sentiment is mostly correct, but the writing is terrible.

recursivedoubts

If you never write the code, you'll never be able to read the code effectively. Also, you will not pick up the ability to reason algorithmically. This is why I tell students that they must write the code in my classes: https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Leaving aside the power you are giving to the AI companies by entirely giving up on coding. I say this as someone who uses AI extensively, if ambivalently.

ks2048

If humans are in the loop at all, I don't see why "writing code" is worse than "telling the computer what to do". With the right high-level abstractions, I can write code as fast as trying to convert that thought into English (for some tasks).

pfannkuchen

I’m confused how LLM code is so different from open source code, from the perspective of the developer. Like if someone gave you a magic wand that let you conjure a mature open source library that did most of what you needed for your project, that would be amazing right? Would you refuse to use it because you miss writing your own database or API framework? Or would you just get to build way more ambitious things? Software is already stitching a bunch of things together in most cases, why not stitch together things made by a machine instead of by an open source developer? What percent of developers primarily work on bare metal algorithms? .0001%? Everything else is stitching together existing pieces at some level of abstraction. The real difference seems to be the non-determinism, not that the code is produced automatically. And I think a lot of the work right now that people don’t like seems to be people dealing with the non-determinism, not that so much code can now get generated. I have read accounts of people have similar freak outs about higher level languages, object oriented programming and web services, and all of those just made more demand for software because the potential of software has not nearly been reached. I wonder if the extreme growth of the field has resulted in most people feeling like those huge changes that reduced the amount of code that had to be written per unit of functionality have been around since the dawn of time, and now that another level of code generation has been reached it’s the end of the world (again).

AustinDev

Just put the code in the bag.

bunderbunder

I have a hard time believing the author’s team is doing all their coding with AI, with only the $20/month tier of subscription. When I experimented with writing zero code by hand, my token spend shot up to more like $300/mo. I’m also not ready yet to conclude that that option, as opposed to a more modest version of AI assisted coding, will remain open to me indefinitely. We now have financials confirming that Anthropoic, too, is running a -200% profit margin, which leaves serious cause for concern about whether either GPT or Claude models will still be around in another year or two. And the judge is still out on whether local models can perform well enough to actually do all my coding for me.

nate-gehringer

This whole LLM coding mania has highlighted something that I was previously less appreciative of: some people (self included) like writing code because it is an enjoyable, enriching experience to them. Solving puzzles in code has lit up the reward pathways of my brain since the first time I tried it, and I don’t see why that would ever change. Prodding an LLM into solving a problem is just not the same thing. I understand that the results of prompting could be more exciting than programming to some, but the idea that manual coding is “over” feels dismissive of hobbyists at the very least. Perhaps the author is suggesting that manual programming in the industry is over, but I don’t buy that either. Thesis being, there will eventually be a cost to employing “experts” that lack understanding. > If agents can handle the code, could we finally work directly with the logic, interfaces, and data models we want? Aren’t high-level programming languages very refined encodings of “logic, interfaces, and data models?” Why would using natural language be more efficient at such things than special-purpose languages developed over decades?

jleyank

Maybe handmade code will become like handmade watches, a luxury item or a hobby activity. But I fear that the loss of understanding will lease to worse software and more frustrated users. We all have to see how easy it is to maintain auto-generated code.

VCFundedGenYer

Complete hogwash and nonsense article written by a hack.