Plus, for a lot of people with fluency and experience, it's simply more fun/natural and not meaningfully less productive.
The LLM *may* be used as a mere tool, that is something you ask question time to time, but shouldn't be the thing that makes the work that you should do. Because if we arrive at this point (hopefully never) at that point the CEO of the tech companies may as well say, why we still need developers? Let's fire all of them.
Fortunately they did not, because there is STILL VALUE in writing code by hand, understanding what it happens, what the code will do, etc. I hope this will not be a lost skill, or well, if it does good for me, because the same as nowadays things being able to repair electronic devices makes a ton of money (I've considered opening a repair shop) because there is no one still doing it, will do programmers that well, know how to program.
The most common use for a shovel seems to be "this is as close as I dare get to the wire we know is around here - scrape the dirt away until you find it and then I'll dig the rest out."
In particular comments. I'm not a fan of the comment style LLM tends to write, so I often just write them manually.
And also coming up with the right architecture is also often manual job. Design how to implement things, and let LLM implement it.
It's also been my experience that generating an entire app/portion of code can be much easier by typing out a relatively concise prompt, but this only applies if it's the kind of code I'm
1) free from having to verify afterwards,
2) not having to fight with the LLM to get right, or
3) is coming from someone else in the form of a PR that may/may not have been checked by them first.
Having to deal with these cases has sometimes been the equivalent of using a spoon to dig a foundation, at least in my experience.
To avoid fighting with the LLM to get right, it's useful to first come up with the architecture manually, run it by the LLM first (without writing any code - just talking to it, asking it to find flaws in your architecture), and once both you and LLM are happy with the plan, fire it to execute. This step removes a lot of friction (but not all of it - later iterations are still almost always necessary)
There's just no way I could go back to writing code by hand with the temptation of AI right there in front of me.
I think there are things LLMs are really good at coding up and experimenting with but I think there's still a need to understand the btoader context of your software so you need to dive in at some point.
But yes I agree that as part of learning effort it's important to write, too.
From the OED. The predominant use of "Luddite" has been disparaging for a long time.
You can debate whether it should be or not, but it's not reasonable to criticize conventional use.
edit to add: the irony of the grammatical error in this presumably hand-written sentence inside the "Who's behind this?" link:
> Jared’s web studio Whitefusion is currently partnering with quality businesses & organizations which believe in staying away from costly hype cycles and the value of the human touch.
I'm sure a lot of the signatories on this list feel the same.
/s
People dont seem to realize prompt to code is just another interface. Is the human review part that we should care about, did this code get reviewed and reiterated on? Is it fully AI generated and reviewed?
Those are the important tasks.
Whoever feels like a better programmer because they write all the terraform files by hand and not use an llm, dislike.
To each their own, though.
I've worked in corporate environments for nearly two decades, and I can assure you that I have seen a lot of very low-quality "handcrafted" code running in production. I don't really see "handcrafted" as a signifier of quality, even if I agree that SOME SPECIFIC handcrafted code is better than SOME SPECIFIC AI-written code (and vice versa).
Peteriishak•1h ago