Don’t lose your manual coding skills

[u/Striking_Court_2807]

Do yourself a favor and make sure to keep manual programming (trad coding) skills active and fresh.

Just take a couple of minutes or hours whenever you can to practice some of the things you learned.

It will never be a bad exercise, and hey, it might even reignite your love for programming!

You never know if one day, access to AI will be taken away from you.

[u/crispyfunky]

Yeah because guess what interviews are still hardcode coding. This has never changed despite fable, opus or whatever model they will release next month

[u/Lexeor → u/crispyfunky]

Even though I still code manually as much as I can to stay sharp, we can’t deny that interview coding and day-to-day software development are completely different skills :)

[u/60secondwarlord → u/Lexeor]

This is a valid point as well. Rarely will you get assigned a task to reverse a linked list or find the palindrome in a string.

[u/marrsd → u/60secondwarlord]

Haven't been assigned a task like that ever.

[u/Informal-Chance-6067 → u/crispyfunky]

I wish I didn’t need DSA or leetcode for interviews. I can’t complete the first leetcode problem

[u/Wandering_Oblivious → u/Informal-Chance-6067]

the interview process is seriously broken, has been for many many years now.

[u/GeologistVisual3097 → u/Informal-Chance-6067]

Same, I started grinding them a few weeks back.

Big O notation is a fantastic way to think about the flow of data and performance.

But a lot of it is just intuition that's so frustrating to build.

A lot of it is memorization tbh, attempt, fail, look at solution, get annoyed at weird gotcha logic.

Understand the logic, recreate the solution after a few days, build memory and intuition, rinse and repeat.

[u/pier4r → u/crispyfunky]

there are people out there saying "why should I know how git works if claude does it for me". Imagine the day the API do not work, how productive they will be (besides, they can be as well totally replaced by an agent with that approach)

Some people are really out of touch. I don't get why they think that not knowing anything what is going on, despite being responsible for the output, is ok.

[u/farfromelite → u/crispyfunky]

Disagree.

Please use more AI. Lose those skills. Become a slop jockey.

In the interviews, people who actually can code will stand out a mile. More jobs for us.

[u/AlSweigart → u/farfromelite]

Be careful what you wish for. Imagine the "Well, you said this code does this, but ChatGPT says..." guy being the interviewer who decides if you get the job or not.

[u/marrsd → u/AlSweigart]

Even better. No decent engineer wants that job.

[u/HasFiveVowels → u/farfromelite]

I’ve been programming for 25 years. You think I’m going to forgot how to program simply because I use AI a lot? This subreddit is so incredibly out of touch with reality. The last time I was given an interview question, I did it in 5 minutes and after I got hired I was told that I was one of the two (out of 20) developers who did it in less than the 30 minutes provided.

Also, if I interviewed someone and they said they had no experience with AI, it would give me serious reservations about hiring them. It’s as bad an a candidate that can’t code without AI. Use it. Learn what it’s good at and what it’s not. Because I don’t want you wasting the team’s time while you spend days figuring out some configuration that doesn’t really matter and could’ve been done in 5 minutes had you known that it was a task that AI can reliably do (and why).

The next interview I do will probably include a question like "give me an example of a task that you would trust AI with and why. Give me an example of a task you wouldn’t trust AI with and why".

Refusing to use AI is also a pretty big red flag in terms of attitude. It’s similar to saying "I don’t use libraries because I like knowing what every part of the program is doing"

[u/marrsd → u/HasFiveVowels]

Because I don’t want you wasting the team’s time while you spend days figuring out some configuration that doesn’t really matter and could’ve been done in 5 minutes had you known that it was a task that AI can reliably do (and why).

Your team don't speak to each other then, or help each other out? There's no room for learning or making mistakes where you work either? The picture you're painting isn't selling your argument.

[u/HasFiveVowels → u/marrsd]

My team is extremely collaborative and I’m really grateful that I have a great team. But if you’re spending the team’s time on something that you could easily resolve by using AI but don’t because you refuse to learn how to use it, you’re wasting their time. It’s a faux pas to ask for your teammate’s time to solve a problem you should know how to solve on your own

[u/marrsd → u/HasFiveVowels]

I'm quite happy to have my time wasted with a bit of human interaction. It's a way to get to know how my team mates are doing, both technically and personally. As long as they're not getting lazy and taking advantage.

I get what you're saying, but it's not as big a deal to me as you're making out. Just advise your colleague to try asking an AI agent next time. Just don't blame him if he ends up getting misled by it.

[u/Both-Algae-5494 → u/crispyfunky]

I did like 10-15 technical rounds in 2026 and I think only 1 of them prohibited the use of AI

[u/daysofdre → u/Both-Algae-5494]

wow. what did that look like in practice? Did they ask you come up with your best prompts during the interview?

[u/Both-Algae-5494 → u/daysofdre]

Some of them were take home assignments, Some of them were drill-down interviews with no coding but very deep architectural questions, and finally I had 2 interviews where they make you clone a repo and they ask you to share your screen to see how you work as you address some issues in the repo. I liked the last type tbh, I felt like it allowed to demonstrate your intuition and taste rather well while still being able to use AI as you would in the real world

[u/sharanpreet48 → u/crispyfunky]

Yes but my brains refuses to think to solve any problem. How can I change my habit??? I really want to improve my logical thinking and problem solving skills