Code what you like: A case for coding by hand

The image was generated with the help of AI.

So, being out of touch with writing PHP code in my last role at Schneider Electric, and PHP being one of my favorite languages to program in till now, I suddenly gravitated towards looking into it again. What I found out was that I kind of still like it. Although I use Python on a day-to-day basis for my research, for creating quick scripts, analyzing data, and doing a lot of stuff, and even Bash for that matter, I still find that I enjoy writing code in PHP. For some reason, I wanted my portfolio website to also be in PHP. However, I didn't find an easy, free alternative to host it, and I didn't want to spend too much time searching. Vercel was a nice platform, and Next.js had quite the hype. Maybe it still does, I don't know.

I think we should still code by hand. Whatever language we like, the craft is still there, and the pleasure is still there. Getting your code from an LLM is fine as long as it serves your purpose. But if you miss the days when you could code by hand, and you like getting your hands dirty, then of course, why not? You can still build software the old way. Nothing is lost. You can still do it.

The Hidden Complexity of AI Code

People say you'll be left behind if you don't know AI coding and how to orchestrate agents to some degree. I agree with that. But the amount of time it takes to put down the correct guardrails and a proper system makes the overall architecture more complex, and troubleshooting quite difficult. If you don't understand what you're generating, what you are doing with the code, why you are implementing it, or what the requirement of the business or your personal website is, it can be anything. If you feel that some part of the code or the way you're working can be done by hand, then you should do it. Do not over-rely on AI. Do not hand off everything to LLMs, which are essentially just token predictors, in my humble opinion.

Reclaiming the Craft

As a grad student and someone with experience working in software, I understood one thing: I liked coding, and I still do. I think if you are experiencing this feeling that coding doesn't make you happy anymore, you can start doing some side projects in your free time. It can revive those dormant feelings of enthusiasm, amazement, and the satisfaction of fighting a bug for hours.

Do not just use AI to hand off the answer. Fight with it, try to search for solutions, Google it the old-fashioned way, reach the solution yourself, and try to make the code and linting beautiful, whatever we used to do. Write the tests on your own. If you can't do it professionally, at least you can do it in your free time. It can give you back that sense of happiness you used to get by building software, even if it's just a small hobby project.

I kind of disagree with the sentiment that "coding is not the hard part." If that were true, people probably wouldn't have paid developers that much historically. Coding is a fundamental part of software development. You cannot say that the actual building doesn't matter just because we got new machines. A mason still needs to learn how to combine two bricks.

To be completely clear: I still use LLMs every single day for my research and development. I am not anti-AI by any stretch. I just wanted to put these thoughts out in the public domain because I believe we shouldn't completely lose the essence of what made us engineers in the first place.

Anyway, I'll stop before I start sounding like a Buddhist monk preaching the Zen philosophy of manual brick-laying. Happy coding!