Should new engineers still write code by hand, or just use AI?
Hey everyone
I'm not an engineer, just someone who has been watching the tech world closely and is really curious about whats coming next.
I keep seeing more and more people using AI to write code. It makes sense—it's quick and it helps with tough problems in a big way.
I keep thinking about the old way of writing code by hand. When you do it yourself you actually understand why things work, not that they work. That kind of knowledge feels like it creates better instincts.
So for people starting out: is using AI enough?. Is there still real value in the slow hands-on process of writing it yourself?
I'm not asking which is faster—I'm asking which helps build engineers in the long run.
Would love to hear your thoughts especially if you have been in the field, for a while. How did you learn? 🙏
Replies
I wrote apps by hand for years and now most of my code comes from an agent, so I've seen both sides of this. The thing hand coding taught me wasn't syntax, it was what breaks: a request that dies halfway, a job that runs twice, a cache that lies. Those instincts are exactly what you need to supervise an agent, because the agent will cheerfully write code that works today and say "done" when it isn't. So my advice to someone starting out is slightly different from "write it by hand". Let the model write, but debug by hand. Don't ask it to fix a bug until you've found the line yourself and can say why it's wrong. Reading a stack trace, adding a log line, reproducing a failure in a small case, that's where the understanding comes from, and nobody has automated it away. The person who only ever pastes the error back into the chat learns nothing, and in a year will not be able to tell a good fix from a plausible one. The person who finds the bug first and then lets the model type the fix learns almost as much as I did, in a fraction of the time.
I learned the slow way, mostly because there wasn't another way back then. At my first job I didn't even know what an OS was. I read tech books while eating and even while walking, and in about a year I was getting harder work than my boss. After that I wrote Perl and PHP for years.
These days my agent writes all of it, and I don't read the code. Quality comes from tests instead. I made an in-house standard for E2E tests, and no product ships until it passes them.