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points by Fervicus 2 days ago | 0 comments

It's crazy to me that this is considered embarrassing now. People should stay up to date with current tech, but we shouldn't be ashamed of not using LLMs. Let's re-normalize coding by hand.

[–] 946789987649 1 day ago

I was an AI-skeptic for a while but it is embarrassing to not even try it. I'm still on the more manual end of AI use. My prompts are very small, targeted changes. I still review every line as though a human wrote it. I know exactly what I want and I've got my prompts and claude.MD at a point where it gives me that most of the time. I probably only write 5% of the code now.

[–] Animats 2 days ago

I did, for a long time, but we're past that point now. Someone else got something done in three months that took me years of hand coding.

[–] bloppe 2 days ago

If something took 3 months, then there must have been a good deal of manual attention involved, even if it wasn't typing each character by hand.

I still find that it's often faster to combine manual coding with generation. I often start by setting up a skeleton with a bunch of TODOs, then tell my agent to fix each TODO. If my agents can't seem to stop coming up with insanely massive diffs for what should be small changes, it's often much faster to just code it properly by hand.

[–] martin82 2 days ago

Coding by hand, sure! But let the LLM at least auto-complete your thoughts. They are still your thoughts, but it's just 100x faster than coding by hand.

[–] steve1977 2 days ago

And thinking by brain.