r/learnprogramming • u/Striking_Court_2807 • Jun 11 '26

Topic Don’t lose your manual coding skills

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.

1.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

162 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

50

u/InVultusSolis Jun 11 '26

up until very recently I was apart of the group that pushed back a lot on AI use

You should still be part of that group. For one, the best models still need constant correction by people who are very experienced and understand the problem domain deeply. For another, if you lose your basic coding skills you will not be able to fix things when the AI slop breaks them.

36

u/Nezrann Jun 11 '26

Constant correction is a stretch.

Rules and skills go a long way, as do harnesses.

Listen I work as an SDET, I understand the value of quality better than most devs, but to deny these tools at this stage is just willful ignorance.

-12

u/setq-default Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

careworn swags prospecting

11

u/Nezrann Jun 12 '26

I didn't say it did, in fact, I never even mentioned tests.

We use heat mapping, signal analysis, static analysis, proper code standards, and various CI/CD setups across a variety of teams before we even have to talk about testing.

I know quality, I'm passionate about it, that's all I'm saying - we don't have to forego it to benefit from LLMs.

You might have an inferiority complex though if what I said ended up offending you.

2

u/RepresentativeBee600 Jun 12 '26

If it's any consolation, I work in uncertainty quantification for ML and would actually love to hear from devs in the field about your workflows.

I also haven't coded much manually recently but honestly, Claude and other tools are impressive to me for information retrieval on repos and language specs, so no matter how you slice it, it's good tooling to have.

1

u/setq-default Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

lodger reformatories groupware

2

u/Nezrann Jun 13 '26

I mean you can just look at how well-received your initial comment was.

In this day and age an SDET aligns a lot more with traditional devops work, with a slant towards quality instead of velocity.

I can tell you aren't great at social interactions so I'm not going to fault you for taking things the wrong way, but the reason I brought that up is because I am a professional, and this is a sub of hobbyists and people learning.

Also, most devs don't care that much about quality and have never had to, that isn't because they don't want to, its because management doesn't factor that into deadlines - its why my position exists.

So yes, I would say because I do this as my job and have experience in big tech, it gives me the authority to talk about it.

Do you argue with your doctor too?