> Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?

Of course it is. I started a (commercial) product in Jan, on track for in-field testing at the end of April.

Of course, it's not my f/time job, so I've only been working on it a/hours, but, with the exception of two functions, everything else is hand-coded.

I rubber-ducked with AI, but they never wrote the product for me (other than those two functions which I felt too lazy to copy from an existing project and fixup to work in the new project).