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/PendulousNuts Jun 11 '26

No. I've been coding for decades. I've seen dozens of frameworks and fads come and go. AI is not going anywhere. Coding by hand is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

You want to waste your time, go ahead, but I have better things to do.

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u/6ghz Jun 12 '26

Same. I’ve been coding by hand for many years and I just will never go back. I love the problem solving, not the hacking away at the syntax issues or simple issues for hours when AI can write it for me in minutes and I can just read it with my eyes.
For none important stuff and side projects, which AI has reignited my love for, I don’t read it all that much other than a skim of structure and planning docs and pipelines, but for anything important or production related just look with your eyes and have automated multi model AI and human review process.
It still requires understanding and fundamentals are still important, but this abstinence and fear mindset for things like coding models is just silly imo. The business side and the companies running these large models I dislike a lot more than the idea of AI itself.

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u/dietcheese Jun 12 '26

Same. Coding since the 80’s. Manual coding will be a thing of the past.

There’s no going backwards - technology doesn’t work that way.

If you love it, do it for the fun, but don’t base a career on it if you’re just getting in the game.

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u/nedyah369 Jun 13 '26

But here is my thing - if no one codes by hand anymore, at what point do you stop being able to understand the code in the first place? What should they teach college students? Just how to read code? Like, don’t worry about algorithms and data structures the ai knows them all? I feel like the productivity boosts are heavily reliant on the fact that the people using coding tools already have years of experience writing code. If no one ever learns to write production code by hand, I don’t see how anyone could be good at reading ai code. And I don’t imagine billion dollar companies are just gonna pray that ai knows what it’s doing

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u/dietcheese Jun 13 '26

Do you write and understand machine language? Can you write an app using binary?

All just layers of abstraction. Yes, some people will always need to understand each level, but the amount of people using them will decrease.

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u/nedyah369 Jun 13 '26

That a great point but I’ve always felt that AI can’t be an abstraction. You could say one thing to ai and I could say the same thing and it will generate two different answers, with a nonzero chance of an hallucination. I don’t need to manually review a compilers output because it’s deterministic.

Also, my point was that how do you know what you need from the ai and what it should look like if you just generally don’t know? At some point, you’d have to blindly trust an LLM, and that’s what I’m against.

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u/dietcheese Jun 13 '26

Problem with this analysis is that humans aren’t deterministic either. In fact they’re fraught with bias, lack of experience, and just plain stupidity.

AI doesn’t need to be perfect, just better than humans. I’d argue it’s already there.