The Main Advantage Of Coding "The Old Way" Over AI-Assisted Coding

Typing out code is already the old way. Last week, I stumbled upon I’m Coding By Hand. Its subtitle got my attention: “I’m spending 3 months coding the old way.” The old way of coding The future of coding is already here. Decades ago, we punched cards. For so long, we’ve been typing out symbols inside IDEs. That’s now “the old way.” Maybe the future is AI specs via brain implants. Who knows! What you miss when coding with AI The post made an excellent distinction between old coding vs AI-assisted coding. “when writing code ‘by hand’ I was actually doing two things: writing what I wanted and learning the codebase…if I didn’t know what I wanted exactly, coding agents would be happy to make many assumptions for me. This almost always meant that I didn’t learn as much, and that I wouldn’t have a good grasp of the codebase.” Coding isn’t just typing. It’s decoding business rules or problem constraints to then encode them into a programming language, while Mastering its syntax and rules,…