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hectdevyesterday at 6:57 PM3 repliesview on HN

It's always going to exist. People still build things with hand tools in the year 2026. Let's call it Artisanal Coding.


Replies

raddanyesterday at 7:12 PM

Even if you use AI, there's a certain point where it's not clear that an AI would make you faster. F# is my favorite language, and I've been programming in it so long (since 2012) that I feel like I think in F#. Asking an AI for something can be faster if I can state my requirements informally; but if I need to specify many things precisely to an AI... why not just write the code in F#? Part of the beauty of good functional designs is that they are declarative, not imperative, so in some sense you're really just stating what you want, at finer and finer granularities, until what you want is trivial.

Even when I want code written in a different language (e.g., C/C++), I often still start by making a prototype in F#. This helps me nail down the logic without having to worry about things like allocation or layouts. Perhaps I could ask an AI to do this second step for me, and then use the F# implementation as an oracle. Anyway.

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MarsIronPIyesterday at 8:02 PM

But it already has a name; this noble art is called "programming", or better yet: "hacking".

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deadbabeyesterday at 9:27 PM

trad coding