I'm going back to coding by hand

I'm going back to coding by hand

19 pointsby trencedamp14 comments

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  • Hacker News
  • Welcome back and godspeed.
  • It's very much like agriculture: once we figured it out, we settled and the population grew so fast that we couldn't go back to hunting and gathering and migrating again.
  • > 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' \{} \;
  • Not using an IDE in 2026?
  • Any half decent IDE will change them automatically for you, no need to chase them down. Just look at the git diff if you want to see where things changed.
  • Did the same. First few days was like learning to walk from scratch again. Welcome back, programmer.
    by rf15
  • 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.

  • I feel this too. It's not only that it's not your code it's that you miss it in your fingers. And I don't feel familiar with the code. I'm not sure I would have written it that way. Something feels off. Before, I knew every line, everything that was happening in the code. Now it feels like I'm not doing anything. I'm just telling it what to do, and I'm not sure it's mine.
  • 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'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.
  • I hope I never have to use your software
  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • >I build the base manually and then I can iterate with AI faster once the fundamentals are solid.

    I've had tremendous success with this approach as well.