I haven’t written a single line of code by hand in well over a year by now and I stopped reviewing code manually altogether at least six months ago (maybe more).
That doesn’t mean I’m doing less engineering (quite the opposite). I’ve probably spent twice as much time defining specifications, guardrails, and thinking through the systems I’m building. It means that my attention and skills are just going elsewhere these days, which is pretty natural to me.
Learning a song by ear forces you to engage with it more deeply, and you’re more likely to remember it later. And, if you stop playing a song, eventually you forget how to play it.
I worked for a long time using both Java and C#, but I haven’t picked them up in well over 8 years (since I migrated over to Elixir). I probably still have some vestigial “muscle memory”, but I would definetely need a good refresher on the syntax and features before trying to do anything with it.
But that’s just how life is, you know!? We are constantly making room for new skills and dropping the ones that are less important, it’s a matter of attention management. To use your example: maybe you learn a couple new songs you like more and then you forget about that old one. It’s fine!
There’s a tweet from Matt Pocok I think is really helpful to this kind of discussion since people often conflate terminology all the time online, he mainly splits coding into two categories:
- Tactical: on the ground, short-term. The soldier doing the fighting.
- Strategic: high-view, long-term. The general planning the war.
If you identify as a tactical programmer - a code monkey - then you are out of luck. The job has changed.
I guess your question about how much manual coding you should be doing has more to do with how much you believe you are going to be needing the first skill over the second one going forward.
IMHO, the genie is out of the bottle and not one is putting it back. AI is not going anywhere (even when the bubble bursts). So the technology will only keep improving and become more and more widespread. What does that mean for you? I don’t know, this is not career advice; but this is also not business as usual.
For me personally, I only see myself coding anything by hand if doing it for fun (like picking up a new language to test and play around, etc). Other than I’m good focusing on other things and honing other skills.
