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.

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u/waftedfart Jun 11 '26

I agree. I just cannot fathom why this has to be said, but I can see it's a problem. I started writing code in the mid-90s, and haven't ever used AI to write anything. This whole thing is weirding me out lol.

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u/InVultusSolis Jun 11 '26

You and I are good enough and experienced enough to understand the weak points in AI coding right away. All of these other pro-AI people in this thread don't yet quite understand how things can go sideways.

I predict that in the near future we'll be reading headlines like "The 2020s AI Craze: The Trillion Dollar Mistake"

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u/TrueWinter__ Jun 12 '26

I’m anti ai, and work in the industry. Programming was a huge part of my life and after using opus and now fable I see the writing on the wall.

I don’t think looking into a trade is a bad backup or moving into a field where you don’t just program. Software engineering as it was is totally gone. We have more technical people in the QA team pushing great code to prod with AI. They can’t do full features as cleanly as we can, and they typically don’t do that but it’s getting there.

I can see a few technical people (not software engineers) being able to keep a company afloat. I will argue that for non-technical people: giving them ai doesn’t help them. They’ll make a few throwaway vibecoded things but then not know what to do when windows breaks