this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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As someone that wanted to write but never had the time to learn, what's so bad about writing code manually?
Seems like if you can learn to do it well, you will be fairly well set with that skill.
If you're someone who cares at all about the quality and consistency of your craft, there's absolutely nothing wrong with manually writing code.
If you're a misanthropic "techno-feudalist" who thinks of code as nothing more than an asset to sell, then pumping out as much code as quickly as possible without any human intervention is a very attractive proposition.
Tech, sadly, is absolutely infested with these people at all levels.
You will still need to learn programming manually.
The process of struggling to understand and synthesize working code is a critical part of learning. Skipping it feels easier, but you're hurting your ability to understand coding.
Sure, you can make an LLM generate code and if you're inexperienced it can outperform you on the basic tasks that you're given as exercises. This is a trap that a lot of students fall into. It's very easy to let LLMs do the 'hard work' part of learning while you just read the textbook or watch a video. Unfortunately, the hard part is the part that builds your skillset.
It's just like how you can't just watch a video about physical fitness and then use a robot to lift the weights for you. Sure, you get to the end of your sets faster and you're not physically tired and sore but you won't actually benefit in the ways that matter.
There's nothing wrong with writing code manually. Over the past few months LLMs have gotten a lot better at writing code than they were before, but they can still make weird mistakes.