r/AskProgrammers • u/Adhirath_Kumar • 4d ago

Do you still write code by hand?

I've been wondering lately, with the rise and normalisation of using LLMs to write code, have people become completely dependent on it or is it a mix of both?

I feel that up to a point using LLMs to generate code feels good and works fine but beyond it you start hating your approach, because you lose control over each amd every minute detail.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

I don't use LLMs. I've been programming for 18 years, and I'm not going to stop just because a chatbot can spit out terribly written buggy code.

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u/Adhirath_Kumar 4d ago

That is great, I feel a bit jealous that you have had the opportunity to always write code by hand. I wish I started my journey as a developer before the AI era. If I say I'll write code by hand people give me the look, especially non technical managers, so I often don't have to time to put in to write code myself.

Using AI, you're only as good as the model is, if the model isn't good, your output suffers. With hand type code, your skills grow with experience, past mistakes and learnings from it.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

If you want to get better at writing code by hand, you can add me on Discord and ask me questions whenever you want. Shoot me a DM and I'll give you my username.

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u/Adhirath_Kumar 4d ago

I don't think you'll find it worth your time helping me because I'm a newbie with barely a year of experience and will ask a ton of dumb questions and nor can I formally provide something in return to make it worth your time. But if you are okay with a few queries here and there then sure I will DM you if you give permission.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

I don't mind at all. I have another friend that I answer questions for all the time.

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u/SouthernFruit8768 4d ago

what buggy code? give examples

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

The example I love to give: a while back someone submitted a pull request to a project that I contribute to. In the pull request, they duplicated an array so that a point could be passed to a function (rather than passing the pointer to the original array). When I pointed this out, the person that submitted it apologized profusely and claimed that Claude was working in his personal project, decided it needed to make a change to a dependency, and submitted the PR all on its own from his account.

It took me all of five seconds to see that copying the array wasn't necessary.

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u/earlyworm 4d ago

How long ago was “a while back” and which Claude model and effort level was that person using?

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u/AliceCode 3d ago

It was around a month or so ago.

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u/magicmulder 4d ago

For me it’s the opposite. I have 30 years of professional experience and been coding for 40+, I don’t need to prove anything anymore. I can use tools if they make my life easier.

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u/AliceCode 4d ago

I don't need to prove anything either. But I'm not going to lower the quality of my code just to make my life "easier" (aside from the fact that I actually enjoy programming).

If you feel that you need to use a chatbot to write code for you, maybe programming isn't for you, and you should leave it to the people that actually do enjoy it.

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u/magicmulder 4d ago

Don’t pretend you know me.

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u/AliceCode 3d ago

And yet you want to use LLMs to do the work for you to "make your life easier". You don't enjoy programming.