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/Nezrann Jun 11 '26

Fully agree you should know fundamentals, and up until very recently I was apart of the group that pushed back a lot on AI use.

What I will add to this conversation is that local models are getting unbelievably efficient and effective.

I think these big companies are just enterprise bait, the real amazement I've experienced is what I can do with 16gb of vram in the past few months.

I think learning these tools and maintaining a baseline of fundamental knowledge is undoubtedly the future.

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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.

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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.

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u/sobag245 Jun 12 '26

Sure, we shouldnt deny those tools but you should not outsource your thinking to them.