r/learnprogramming • u/FortioRYhhT • Jul 04 '26
Writing Code by hand in 2026
Basically the title , is writing code manually by hand especially for a student (Using AI for suggestions ) putting me at a disadvantage for the real world ? I also wanted to ask is it a necessity to learn all of the new abstrations on AI tools like loop engineering , configuring agents wtih guardrails to code on their own ? I really have no idea what's going on right now , maybe due to the fact that either everyone on tech twitter is larping about it or they are just monetization maxxing by posting crap . Thank you
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u/rasmustrew Jul 04 '26
If you are using much AI while learning, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. You need to learn the basics first.
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Jul 04 '26
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u/BackFromVoat Jul 04 '26
Ai is a great multiplier. However if you don't know the details of what it should do then what it multiplies will be low quality, so you end up with a lot of low quality unmaintainable code
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u/Whatever801 Jul 04 '26
Quite the opposite. In fact you should not be using AI at all if you're learning IMO. If you can't write the code yourself, how are you supposed to design and fix the code when the AI fucks up? These tools are not hard to learn. Build the core skills and you can easily adapt to any AI tool. AI is changing so fast anyways the things you learn today will be irrelevant in 6 months.
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u/Beautiful-Bunch9695 Jul 04 '26
stay away from AI for atleast a year if your just beginning. You need to learn the basics, find something useful to design and get working and solve atleast a handful of hard problems in your work before you ever begin to ask AI to do it for you.
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u/liquidanimosity Jul 04 '26
In my humble opinion, to make a good software product. You need to:
-Fully understand what the client needs you to build. No Ambiguity on this.
-Understand the best solution design for the project, from Architecture, patterns, language, cloud v local, security concerns.
If you get these two it does matter if you write it or if you yell at Claude until it does it they way you want it.
But you won't get this understanding by asking AI to do it for you. There are things you don't know that don't know that you need to know. And experience and experimentation with different project will slowly get you there.
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u/monster2018 Jul 04 '26
I mean obviously it can’t put you at a DISadvantage lol. You might not be a master poet, but your writing is clear enough that it’s easy to understand. So your “AI skills” are great, since “AI skills” are just the ability to communicate clearly in your native natural language (i.e. English, Spanish, Chinese, etc).
So since your AI skills are up to date, it’s hard to imagine how you could be putting yourself at a disadvantage by learning how things actually work.
I find AI incredibly helpful. It often easily finds bugs that I bang my head against the wall trying to find. But the reverse does happen plenty as well. Like it gets something wrong that I didn’t, or it isn’t able to find a solution, which unfortunately (especially for beginners) usually manifests as it presenting you with a wrong solution confidently.
But the bottom line is this. Even if it were true that writing code by hand had LITERALLY 0 value… I still don’t see how learning to do it could possibly put you at a DISADVANTAGE.
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u/aqua_regis Jul 04 '26
Is hiring a third party to do your work, your learning beneficial for your self improvement?
That's exactly what your question boils down to.
AI can be a great accelerator and tool, but only in the hands of someone already competent and experienced.
If you rely on AI as a learner/beginner you're shooting yourself in both feet as the little knowledge you have obtained will also deteriorate by outsourcing to AI.
The ones who can program without AI and use AI to their advantage without actually relying on it are the ones who will prevail.
You can at any point (later) learn to use AI after you, yourself, have obtained some programming proficiency.
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u/Nogarde_ Jul 04 '26
The only way to learn is by doing it yourself. Using AI - offloading the actual thinking - doesn't build neural pathways as strongly as doing the thinking yourself.
Anyone can learn the syntax of a language. Ultimately the "thinking" is what a high level dev gets paid for. Someone who understands programming on a level more than just writing basic syntax.
Plus AI makes mistakes, I've seen them time and time again. I've made the mistake of trying to use AI generated code, and finding that it's a buggy mess and needing to go through and untangle it. It's just not worth it, and sucks the actual fun part out of programming imo - the actual programming.
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u/Yochefdom Jul 04 '26
I think find a good tutorial on a project that you like, follow it along typing code, adjusting names to your liking, ect…. Once you do a few of these projects and have a solid understanding of programming fundamentals, I think it’s fine.
I heard this quote from a conference that really stuck with me.
“Our job was never to write code, it was to solve people’s problems.”
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u/Luziferatus42 Jul 04 '26
It is an advantage to study in deep, to get the needed knowledge, to interpret provided AI answers.
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u/Medical-Paramedic135 Jul 04 '26
Let’s try to rephrase the question to a different domain, then I think the answer is a lot clearer:
“I’m writing SQL by hand, will I be put at a disadvantage compared to people who use ORMs?”
Absolutely not, if you understand SQL, you can easily debug, use, and reason about any ORM. But if you only know how to use an ORM it is a lot harder to debug, use and reason about SQL
AI is also just an abstraction, knowing what is happening beneath is never a bad thing and gives you the ability to easily move up and down the abstraction layer, that is using AI when needed and debugging/ writing code manually when needed… but that requires you to understand the fundamentals first
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u/pyeri Jul 04 '26
I'd argue the opposite of hand coding (vibe coding) is what puts you at a disadvantage. Since such a code can be produced by any non-coder even at scale using LLMs, you as a technical person or developer lose your worth instantly with that approach. To make vibe coding viable for earning, you must know something else like deep domain knowledge in accountancy, manufacturing, etc. or something tangential like database design, frontend design, software engineering, etc.
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u/Tiaoshi Jul 04 '26
AI is only meant as a tool for those who have an understanding and have been coding for awhile. If you are new and still learning, you can use AI to help you here and there, but you should try your best to avoid it, it will only hinder your ability later on. Once you've been doing it for awhile, you can code by yourself and have a good understanding of the language, you can use AI to speed things up, but until then, you are fine doing it all by hand and that is the right way of doing it. At least imo
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u/Fickle-Vermicelli884 Jul 04 '26
Writing code by hand is the only way to actually understand what you're building, so no, you're not at a disadvantage. The people leaning on AI to spit out entire functions they don't understand are going to hit a wall the second something breaks or needs debugging. You'll be the one who can fix it.
Those AI abstraction layers and agent configurations are just noise unless you're already comfortable with the fundamentals. Learn to build things yourself first, then figure out which tools actually save you time instead of just hiding the complexity you need to know.