  > The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance

It does not. English (or any human language) is an awful language to write specifications in, because it is not as precise as code. Each time you "compile" your prompt into a program, LLMs spit up something a little bit different. How is it a good thing?

  > so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code (both by continuing to read it and instruct tools to write it), what’s the issue?

The post mentions this. You need to write code yourself to keep your review skill (know what's good and what's bad) sharp. You think why if you want to learn something, you better get a paper, a pen and write notes, by hand, like in those ancient times? You would think we're in 2026, you can grab an ipad, watch some videos and become an expert? No. You need to have your hands dirty. By writing some damn code.

▲ heartbreak 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Each time you "compile" your prompt into a program, LLMs spit up something a little bit different. How is it a good thing?

Because that’s not how it works. How can we have a discussion about this topic if we don’t have a mutual understanding of how the tools even work?

The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists.

	▲	orphea 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, it exists, but are you going to edit it by hand if you didn't write it in the first place, or you would rather throw another prompt to update it? People tend to do the latter, thinking about the code as some generated artifact, like object files.
	▲	skydhash 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The code is not replaced by English prompts. The code still exists If you can guarantee that it does what you say it does, then all is ok. The core issue since the advent of ChatGPT was always this reliability issue, whether the end result, the code, addresses the change request issued. It turned out that you need to be an expert programmer to vet the code as well as supervise its evolution, whatever the tool used to write it.