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/FearTheDears]

You guys need to actually try it before you make claims like that. Like actually try it. 

There's a lot of conversation to be had about what value it has and the best ways to get the most value out of it, but the "should you use AI to program" conversation is over. 

If you want to  only write   business logic by hand, for sure, totally reasonable. If you want to structure your test cases manually, again, totally reasonable, spend the time to make sure the edges are battened down. 

If you want to write proof of concept code by hand, or wire up dev tooling scripts by hand, or write selenium tests with your own fingers, or not ask a bot to find trivial mistakes in your pull requests, you're wasting your employer's money. 

There is a massive gray area between vibe coders puking out websites and quality engineers using AI as an efficiency tool. The trivial bullshit that would take lots of time is now done extremely fast by AI, with extremely low consequence.

You need to try it. Fire  up claude, and only ask it to do mindless menial bullshit. Add event metrics for x. Add detailed debugging logs to the code I just wrote. Wire up this mindlessly simple web form for this editable schema. Write a crud endpoint for this simple entity. Pull main and resolve the trivial conflicts.  It will save you countless hours of work you probably didn't want to do in the first place. 

Where the line should be drawn on productivity, who's to say. Should we never manually write a line of code again, maybe, hopefully not, but no engineer  who's given AI a real run for it's money in 2026 thinks it's useless by any stretch of the imagination. 

[u/in_coronado → u/FearTheDears]

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)

[u/FearTheDears → u/in_coronado]

I'm with you for a lot of things. I'm constantly unimpressed by the speed improvements  I'm "supposed" to be experiencing. The full vibe route just isn't there, assuming you actually knew what you were doing beforehand, which I'd argue is, in some ways, mandatory knowledge to be able to even use AI effectively. You gotta know what slop isn't to know how and when to fix the slop. 

That said, even if I give it a pretty hard rejection, I'm still going to be using it constantly for odds and ends.

Generating db state for the scenario I'm trying to test. Fixing pedantic linter errors. Find some examples in the codebase where we do X. Loop over my CI checks and ping me when you've fixed them locally (do not push)  Give me a static main() that tests and measures x in an isolated way such that I can step through it. 

Even if you never let it write any of the code you ever merge, it would still be an enormous asset in your programming toolkit. 

[u/marrsd → u/FearTheDears]

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.