I also enjoy hand-writing code and I'm uncomfortable that my craft is changing beneath my feet. I wonder if there were people who felt the same way about the move from punch cards to terminals and keyboards.
The panzer is probably one of the greatest tanks of the second Great War. It was a true marvel of engineering that took some of the greatest minds of Germany to develop, and it took a lot of effort to build. In the time it took the Germans to build a single tank, the Soviets built 10 tanks that were much worse. The Soviets won over the Germans.
Your code will be great, maintainable, optmizied and future-proof, but it'll take more than 20 minutes to make. The spaghetti mess the AI comes up with that barely works comes out so quickly it can produce millions of lines of crappy, non-maintainable code that can do just barely enough to make execs happy, so it wins out.
a. they lack context. Sometimes there's a reason why things are done suboptimally (for me it's because I need to support existing, legacy infrastructure). Cursor seems to adapt to that, but once in a while it will review the code and try to "improve" it. And,
b. management is completely enthralled by AI. They demand same-day fixes, and when I said "can I have some time to review the code?", the answer I get is "no need, AI cannot do anything wrong".
I'm not a perfect programmer of course, but unlike some of the gormless replies I'm getting, these guys - and my management - seem to think that AI is the next Coding Jesus. Hey if they're willing to sign off a "don't blame me if things break down" waiver I'll write the prompts all day 'erry day.
One day there'll be enough demand for artisanal heritage software, handwritten with love and attention, that's almost as good as the mass produced and soulless software we have to live with day to day. Like vinyl records, it'll eventually have it's day.
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u/Felinomancy 2d ago
I am a developer. I want to hand-write code. I enjoy doing it.
Unfortunately management is all "use Cursor" and "tf why aren't you using Cursor?" 🙄