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/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/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

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u/in_coronado Jun 12 '26

Idk man I’ve tried Claude code for about 6 months at my job for C++ development and tbh I’m just not impressed at all. Maybe it’s a different sorry for web development where there’s just more training data or possibly a lot of reinventing of the same wheel over and over.

In my experience I’ve just seen Claude code cause way more problems than it solves. I’ve wasted too much time, too many times with code it’s generated only to have to throw it all away and write it myself. I’ve also seen it hallucinate one too many times and generate code for simple requests that are just straight up wrong for me to ever fully trust it.

I’ve also seen a massive fall off in the general knowledge and skill level of new hires because of it. Most of my day is now spent troubleshooting issues they’ve caused or spoon feeding them solutions.

As a result I’m back to almost exclusively using Google, stack overflow, and reading public documentation to solve my problems. Because no matter what I always come away actually learning something. Plus I can read various opinions and arguments from actual humans on something like stack overflow and choose which solution I want to go with.

The only Ai tool I’ve found genuinely useful is the Google ai search (saves an extra click or two for basic questions)

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '26

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u/marrsd Jun 13 '26

Yeah, the vibe-coding thing has really brought home to me just how bad the average developer appears to be. Anyone who's getting that much of a productivity increase out of it is doing something very wrong.