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I'm going back to writing code by hand

https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/
72•dropbox_miner•1h ago

Comments

archleaf•1h ago
So what you really mean is you are going to do better and more detailed skills files so you can get an architecture that you've thought through rather than something random?
dropbox_miner•1h ago
Partly, but the order matters. The CLAUDE.md constraints only work if you designed the architecture first. They're just how you communicate it to the AI. The mistake I made wasn't writing bad skills files, it was not designing anything at all and expecting the AI to make coherent structural decisions across 30 sessions.

The rewrite is me sitting down with a blank doc and drawing the boxes before any code exists. Then the CLAUDE.md enforces what I already decided. Whether that actually holds up as the project grows, I genuinely don't know yet.

cpncrunch•1h ago
Are you really saving any time at all using AI at all then? If you have to write the architecture for it, write all the rules you want it to follow, check everything it's written, and then reprompt it because it's not how you want it?
SpicyLemonZest•18m ago
Yes. I do all of this and I'd estimate 50-100% coding time savings. A lot of that comes from better multitasking over single-workstream throughput, which I suppose might compromise the gains depending on what you're doing. For me it amplifies the speedup by allowing some of my "coding time" to be spent on non-coding tasks too.
cpncrunch•10m ago
But even if coding time is reduced by half, is that worth the downsides? Coding has never really been a major percentage of my time.
gjvc•1h ago
have another drink and drive yourself home
binyu•1h ago
> I'm rewriting k10s in Rust. Not because Rust is better but, because it's the language I can steer. I've written enough of it to feel when something's wrong before I can articulate why. That instinct is the one thing vibe-coding can't replace. The AI hands you plausible-looking code. You need a nose for when it's garbage.

Isn't Golang relatively easier to read than Rust? I was under the impression that Rust is a more complex language syntactically.

> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules. The architecture decisions that the AI kept making wrong are now made in writing before the first prompt.

This post is good to grasp the difference between "vibe-coding" and using the AI to help with design and architectural choices done by a competent programmer (I am not saying you are not one). Lately I feel that Opus 4.7 involves the user a lot more, even when given a prompt to one-shot a particular piece of software.

dropbox_miner•50m ago
Go reads fine whether the architecture is good or bad, and I couldn't tell the difference until I was in trouble. Rust is harder to read but harder to misuse. The borrow checker would have caught that data race at compile time. I've also just written more Rust. That familiarity matters separately.

+1 on Open 4.7 involving the user a lot more. Rn I'm trying to get to a state where I can codify my design + decision preferences as agents personas and push myself out of the dev loop.

binyu•46m ago
Gotcha, that implies you are going to read the code that the AI produces anyways.

> Go reads fine whether the architecture is good or bad

Were you reading the Golang code all along and got fooled or did you review it after it failed? Sorry I admit I didn't read the whole article.

williamstein•29m ago
He was NOT reading the code: "For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote."
binyu•25m ago
Right, thank you. Personally I think reading all the code that the AI produces is impossible and kind of defeats the purpose of using it. The key is to devise a structured way to interact with it (skills and similar) and use extensive testing along the way to verify the work at all steps.
erelong•54m ago
Can't you just ask AI to break up large files into smaller ones and also explain how the code works so you can understand it, instead of start over from scratch?
dropbox_miner•43m ago
That was actually the first thing I tried. It did a good jov at explaining the code base mess and the architecture. Then I ran 3-4 refactor attempts. Each one broke things in ways that were harder to debug than the original mess. The god object had so many implicit dependencies that pulling one thread unraveled something else. And each attempt burned through my daily Claude usage limit before the refactor was stable.

And I'm sure the rewrite is going to teach me a whole different set of lessons...

joshuanapoli•43m ago
Rewrite following a new architecture plan could get finished pretty quickly, treating the original as a prototype.
SpicyLemonZest•15m ago
When people talk about codebases being "incomprehensible", it's not always hyperbole. Sometimes the architecture literally cannot be broken up or understood.
whattheheckheck•4m ago
I find that really hard to believe. It's not like curing cancer
epec254•52m ago
Not sure if just me, but this post feels AI written?
pipeline_peak•25m ago
Feels a bit too long winded to be AI generated.
mpurbo•50m ago
Strict SDD might help to constrain and harness the process.
AIorNot•49m ago
This doesnt make much sense the article itself is AI written

It would have been easy to run a few ai agents to review the code and find these issues as well and architect it clearly

keithnz•48m ago
AI writes what you ask it to write, you need to talk to it about architecture. You should have an architecture doc so AI can shape the code based on that, you can get the AI to make the architecture doc also. If using claude you can use the software architecture mode for this.
xantronix•41m ago
So you're not actually writing code by hand? I'm very confused by the difference between the title and the conclusion here.
nothinkjustai•32m ago
Writing code by hand is an oxymoron. You don’t write code with AI, AI doesn’t write, it generates.
apt-apt-apt-apt•27m ago
Outright lie clickbait. As he states himself, he's doing the design work by hand, and will likely still use AI to write code.
EMM_386•27m ago
You don't need to go back to coding by hand if you know how to do it already. There is a middle ground.

If you understand good software architecture, architect it. Create a markdown document just as you would if you had a team of engineers working with you and would hand off to them. Be specific.

Let the AI do the implementation of your architecture.

kypro•26m ago
> I learned over these 7 months

7 months ago was early November. Coding assistants were getting very good back then, but they were still significantly poorer at making good architectural decisions in my experience. They tended to just force features into the existing code base without much thought or care.

Today I've noticed assistants tend to spot architectural smells while working and will ask you whether they should try to address it, but even then they're probably never going to suggest a full refactor of the codebase (which probably is generally the correct heuristic).

My guess is that if you built this today with AI that you wouldn't run into so many of these problems. That's not to say you should build blind, but the first thing that stood out to me was that you starting building 7 months ago and coding assistants were only just becoming decent at that time, and undirected would still generally generate total slop.

shahbaby•25m ago
This reads too much like it was LLM generated. I can't say for sure if it was but I have an allergic reaction to the short snappy know-it-all LLM writing style.
plastic041•22m ago
Title says

> back to writing code by hand

But what they are doing is

> doing the __design work__ myself, by hand, before any code gets written.

So... Claude still is generating the code I guess?

And seriously, I can't understand that they thought their vibe coded project works fine and even bought a domain for the project without ever looking at source code it generated, FOR 7 MONTHS??

ipaddr•16m ago
When he mentions I push commits at work for as long as my tokens last I can understand that. Managing tokens has become an important skill.
photochemsyn•8m ago
Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly?

Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have never paid for a compiler.

This whole investor bubble will blow up in the face of the rentier-finance capitalists and I’ll be laughing my head off while it happens.

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