Now is the best time to write code by hand

Practicing code specifically is one of many options for engineers right now. How about other skills? For example, now seems like a good opportunity to start developing deep knowledge in a particular domain, so that when you build AI assisted software in that space, you’re competent enough to know if it’s doing the right thing. Or, develop a better understanding of a range of disciplines, so that when you go to solve problems, you’re aware of them and have more areas to draw from. (The combination is what Valve calls a T-shaped employee I believe.) Also a good opportunity to develop your interpersonal skills.

Now is the time to practice following a horse pulling a plough, because soon all the other farm hands will forget the nuances of handling a plough manually and your skills will be sought after by those who want you to drive a tractor. Wait, what?

Yes, I only want hand crafted, artisanal, small-batch, free-range, organic code.

Totally agree. Especially for commercial or code that adds value. Writing code is just one element of developing quality, robust, software. In the rea world, commercial or production software must be maintained, supported, and must respond to changing user requirements. The human element is critical, unless you’re OK with relying on LLM’s, crossing your fingers, and have no care to support users.

AI atrophies the brain -

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...

> Once you try the models, you realise how good they are, and there is the second incentive. These things write working code and as the models get better and better, the argument that they make mistakes will get quieter and quieter until it fades away, like all high conviction opinions that turn out to be wrong over time do.

Is this true though? Will the models get better and better? I'm not a hater, but Sonnet/Opus generates terrible code albeit mostly functioning code.

What I've been noticing is the abundance of the same "revolutionary" idea spoon fed by claude to everyone and their mom.

Coding gives the edge in creativity

While I agree with the outcome, I don't agree with reasoning. What really matters for larger projects isn't how quickly you can write code, but how easy it is to understand the code and the architecture to those modifying the specific part. And this is where exclusively relying on LLMs is a disservice to you in the end — while they are good at generating _plausibly looking_ code, it's typically quite flawed, but in a non-obvious way, which is often hard to catch even for senior engineers. Thus for longer term it's actually beneficial to write most of the critical code by hand, and only leave less important stuff to LLMs. What percentage should be left to LLMs highly varies between projects, so there is no single good number.

I don't even want to start arguing. OPs view is flawed in multiple different ways and I'd need to write an essay to point it all out.

This article forgot the strongest argument for hand writing your code. When the process is done, you understand it at a depth far beyond any vibe coder who created the same thing

I don't know, when I started out as a web developer I met a hardcore C developer once and I was quite impressed about his low level knowledge, and wanted to eventually learn that too. But as time passed by the web world kept developping and becoming more interesting and eventually I want to make applications in the end. A few years later I saw the guy again and he told me he got into Ruby on Rails businesses, because there was a lot of work in there.

I think for a lot of people, the truth is they wanted an excuse to stop writing code and LLMs gave it to them. That's why the shift has been so violent and abrupt. The majority found what they were looking for. No appeal to logic or reason as to why total submission to the machine is a bad thing will register.

and prose, and sketching.

All these things (code, prose, sketching) are about thinking through making.

I know brain atrophy is mentioned a lot these days. But is anyone worried about early onset dementia? If we see a higher number of younger dementia patients needing care in the next few decades, once again it will be the next generation who will bear the burden just so the current generation can do the "lulz". Jesus tap-dancing Christ the job wasn't even that hard in the first place.

Is the purpose of this article to say "If you only do one thing, you will likely not excel at other things"? Is there anyone to which this is not an obvious conclusion? Did I miss the point?

such a bad take.

I think you'd have to start with 55+ years old and go upward to find an age range where more than 10% of programmers routinely wrote assembler code in their careers.

To find the same for machine code you'd need to start at 65 or older.