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I personally enjoy coding by hand still, but I do it much less often than I used to. Claude has gotten good enough at generating code I want it to generate that it is undoubtedly faster than writing it by hand, with generally speaking next to zero loss of context (for me) and understanding. If I don’t understand what it produces, I stop and review until I do. But there comes a point where you’ve seen most patterns in code and very few surprise you, at least with a language you’re familiar with. I would never use it so heavily for a new language - I need to know the language before I can become comfortable allowing Claude to write it for me. So then programming becomes more system design and less about actual writing code. Which is generally not bad - it allows you to experiment quicker and land on better solutions faster.
I would not recommend this approach to juniors though. You need to get in there and fuck some shit up and learn from mistakes. Then later on, you can defer the “grunt work” to an LLM.
Not long ago, I said I didn’t want to use an LLM for coding because I didn’t want to do more code review than I already did. But that has changed, because the quality of the code I’m reviewing from Claude is better. I’m sure that’s partly from Claude itself. But I think also having proper guidance in instruction MD files, and clear examples to follow in the codebase helps. LLMs are pattern matchers, after all.
I don't feel the need to code by hand, character for character, anymore, and enjoy being free to think at higher abstraction levels, and try random ideas out at low cost.
I'm also not yolo dev-ing. If the code is doing something important (low bar: I'll use it or give/ship it for other people to use), I'll painstakingly review the code that's generated (95% of my dev time is code review and QA now). Judging from what I see online and the chuckles (hut, skill issue) I get from programmer frens, that might make my situation odd and explain why I don't feel like I'm losing anything.
If you're anything like me, it's not diminished ability as much as it is diminished motivation. IME our feelings are smart. In particular, our feelings are smart about us. If you believe you'll never code by hand again, and don't find purpose or pleasure in by-hand coding, it's going to be hard to lift a finger to do it, let alone get your brain to cooperate when thinking through a one-shottable code generation problem.
I suspect this is why folks have zero reservations about sharing essay slop; they never understood why many people learned and continue to write by-hand: to think. If you enjoy thinking, you'll enjoy writing by hand and do it even without an external goal. Most of us write code for the output and you don't need to write code by-hand to get output anyone. However, if you write code for some reason other than output, for some reason that depends on you writing it by hand (e.g. learning a new programming language), I suspect you'll remain motivated and able to do that.
If you are a roofer, and the nail gun were invented, how often would you feel the need to use a hammer for practice's sake?