Some are happier writing code by hand

Abhinav Omprakash: I Am Happier Writing Code by Hand

Yes, coding is not software engineering, but for me, it is a fun and essential part of it. In order to be effective at software engineering, you must be familiar with the problem space, and this requires thinking and wrestling with the problem. You can’t truly know the pain of using an API by just reading its documentation or implementation. You have to use it to experience it. The act of writing code, despite being slower, was a way for me to wrestle with the problem space, a way for me to find out that my initial ideas didn’t work, a way for thinking. Vibe coding interfered with that.

When reading this post, I couldn’t help but think about photography. Modern digital cameras are remarkable pieces of technology, and by their very nature, they simplify the photography process by abstracting away complexity and solving many problems for you. There are countless skills that used to be required if you were going to do photography, which now just don’t even come to mind for most photographers.

Look at any post from someone “going back to film” and you’ll see reasons very similar to why the original author wants to write every line of code themselves.

The permanence of film forces you to pay more attention to the light, whether that's the quality, quantity, and direction of light in your scene or how much light you're letting pass through onto the film itself. There's less room for error than digital where you can go back over your settings and experiment almost infinitely.

All this makes me wonder what the future will look like. As I've written about before, the act of writing code has abstracted away tons of complexity that previous generations had to understand deeply. Today, if you're writing in Swift for example, there's a million things that you don't need to worry about because the computer just takes care of them for you.