alt Hacker NewsOne thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.
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I've heard people say that these coding agents are just tools and don't replace the thinking. That's fine but the problem for me is that the act of coding is when I do my thinking!
I'm thinking about how to solve the problem and how to express it in the programming language such that it is easy to maintain. Getting someone/something else to do that doesn't help me.
But different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Yes, it's often faster if you sit around waiting. What I will do instead is prompt the AI to create various plans, do other stuff while they do, review and approve the plans, do other stuff while multiple plans are being implemented, and then review and revise the output.
And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it, but my time is more expensive than Claude's time, and so as long as I'm not sitting around waiting it's a net win.
For me it _can_ be faster to code than to instruct but it takes me significantly less effort to write the prompt than the actual code. So a few hours of concentrates coding leave me completely drained of energy while after a few hours with the agents I still have a lot of mental energy. That's the huge difference for me and I don't want to go back.
That’s why we won’t plan anymore or compile it’ll just execute https://jperla.com/blog/claude-electron-not-claudevm
My way of phrasing this: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to really figure what is it that I truly want to write.
I delegate to agents what I hate doing, e.g. when creating a SaaS web app, the last thing I want to waste my time on is the landing page with about/pricing/login and Stripe integration frontend/backend - I'll just tell Claude Code (with Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8 running locally on RTX Pro 6000) to make all this basic stuff for me so that I can focus on the actual core of the app. It then churns for half an hour, spews out the first version where I need to spend another half an hour to fix bugs by pointing errors to Claude Code and then in 1 hour it's all done. I can also tell it to avoid all the node.js garbage and do it all in plain HTML/JS/CSS.
The rebuttal to this would be that you can do many such tasks in parallel.
I’m not sure it’s really true in practice yet, but that would certainly be the claim.
> 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it
I think this is the main point where many people’s work differs. Most of my work I know roughly what needs changing and how things are structured but I jump between codebases often enough that I can’t always remember the exact classes/functions where changes are needed. But I can vaguely gesture at those specific changes that need to be made and have the AI find the places that need changing and then I can review the result.
I rarely get the luxury of working in a single codebase for a long enough period of time to get so familiar with it that I can jump to particular functions without much thought. That means AI is usually a better starting point than me fumbling around trying to find what I think exists but I don’t know where it is.