Andrew Trask replied that the manual coding era stayed enjoyable
Can’t believe I coded by hand for 15 years.
15 years of memorizing syntax, Vim, Stack Overflow, broken builds, cursed dependencies, merge conflicts, and “one last bug before sleep.”
All of that just to end up typing “fix this” into a chat box and watching an agent do crimes.
Many users expressed excitement about shifting from manual coding to AI agents because it feels like magic and enables non-coders to build projects, while others criticized long-term job losses for juniors and agent limitations like review.
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@Yuchenj_UW Plot twist: those 15 years weren’t wasted. We were just the unpaid pretraining set.🤭
@Newyorkez “We were just the unpaid pretraining set”
@Yuchenj_UW the skills weren't wasted.
you needed to understand what was broken before you could tell the agent what to fix
@Yuchenj_UW The 15 years weren't wasted. They built the mental model that tells you when the agent is wrong. People who go straight to AI-assisted coding without the foundation are fast in week one and dangerous in month six. You're not slower than them. You're safer.
@Yuchenj_UW "+ make no mistake!"
@Yuchenj_UW It was fun while it lasted, spent ungodly amount of time on SO. But now we are at higher level of abstraction and thanks to it can build more ambitious projects. So all's good.
@Yuchenj_UW @Yuchenj_UW, Stack Overflow bug hunting already sounds like the Stone Age, Now you describe a bug once and get fixes in seconds. Future devs will probably laugh that we had to manually write multiple prompts just to guide agents.
@Yuchenj_UW the 15 years aren't wasted though. they're the only reason you can spot when the agent's doing crimes. someone who never fought a cursed merge conflict just hits accept and ships the bug. typing's gone, the taste isn't.
@Yuchenj_UW Going from a 10x engineer to basically vibecoding full-time happened so fast. I just point Codex Pro at my reusable skills folder now and watch it refactor entire systems in seconds.
@Newyorkez @Yuchenj_UW @Newyorkez, We became the unpaid pretraining set, got zero credit for it, and now get treated like deprecated legacy infrastructure that might soon be replaced.
@Yuchenj_UW yeah fully agree. we vibe coded a 24/7 ai news radio, fully run by ai. no coding experience before. that's crazy - you just need an idea and dedication these days. abd cool teammates (solo is less fun imho)
@Yuchenj_UW I've coded manually for 34 years and still going on..
That’s a profound shift. After years of wrestling with syntax, obscure errors, and dependency hell, it’s wild how much of the grind has been abstracted away. The real skill now is in knowing exactly what to ask for and verifying the output. The craft isn’t disappearing, it’s just moving up the stack.
@Yuchenj_UW > *watching an agent do crimes
@Yuchenj_UW So very true. But it taught you how to type the right things and analyze the results quickly.
@Yuchenj_UW Imagine how you would feel if you have been doing this for 30+ years. One day you wake up and it all seems like a blur
@Yuchenj_UW the skill shifted from writing code to knowing which part of the output to distrust. harder to hire for, honestly.
@Yuchenj_UW @Newyorkez Just think, a part of you may live on in LLMs for decades. Kinda beautiful. Now here’s your can of government beans.
@Yuchenj_UW and the worst crimes are when the tests still pass
@Yuchenj_UW The day-to-day of an engineer is completely unrecognizable from even two years ago. We wrote a breakdown of what the job actually looks like in 2026 if you're interested: https://leetllm.com/blog/what-does-an-ai-engineer-do
