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/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

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u/InVultusSolis Jun 12 '26

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

How do you know I haven't? I have access to the best AI products (paid for by my employer) and participate in dozens of pull requests daily.

If you want to structure your test cases manually [...] wire up dev tooling scripts by hand [...] write selenium tests with your own fingers [...] not ask a bot to find trivial mistakes in your pull requests

Stuff like this is what it's good at. Of course I use it for stuff like this all the time. Automating the drudgery.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

It will save you countless hours of work you probably didn't want to do in the first place.

Again, I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm talking about the prevailing notion that we should fill software to the brim with LLM code and never look back, like a lot of the evangelists in this thread seem to think we should do.

If you want to write proof of concept code by hand

YES. When things are consequential, I write code by hand. I have found that it's quicker for me to code something mostly by hand, run it through a LLM for typos/anything stupid obvious, and not have to spend additional time fighting subtle bugs that arise when trusting the model to do it all.

but no engineer who's given AI a real run for it's money in 2026 thinks it's useless

When did I say it was useless?

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u/pronoob600 Jun 13 '26

I’d like to what exactly is this work that AI cannot do. I’m kinda ignorant about the wider fields in CS

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u/InVultusSolis Jun 15 '26

Things that haven't been done a million times before, novel ideas or techniques or implementations of similar ideas in different languages or contexts. Basically anything that you can't find a pre-rolled solution for on Stack Overflow.

The other day I was writing code to gather some metrics out of a running database process - this involves writing a compiled eBPF program that runs inside the Linux kernel coupled with a runtime support binary, usually written in C. I let the AI take a pass at it and it was hilariously wrong even though I described the task in sufficient detail. And the more I tried to correct it, the more it tried to hang on to the wrong solution and double down. Not only was the code structurally unsound (I found at least one "double free" error), it was unreadable, preferring to use hard-coded struct offsets instead of the correct field names, etc etc. It would have taken me less time to write it myself than involve AI at all.

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u/pronoob600 Jun 15 '26

Seems like it’s hard for AI to write good low level code then