Ask HN: Is anyone still programming the old-fashioned way (without LLMs)?

I see new engineers adopting AI much faster than the older ones who have been doing all the coding themselves. I very often see senior engineers turing of their copilot after a week out of frustration because it doesnt work the way they want them to, but they arent even trying, they expect it to work 100% in their first try I guess. They spend months learning new technologies to best of their ability but they wont give AI a chance? They think using AI will make them less skilled, but it is not true, it will make them more productive.

We've mostly banned the use of AI coding assistants, with exception of certain uses, for junior level devs/engineers. Essentially, they need to demonstrate that their use case fits with what LLMs are good at (ie. for in-distribution, tedious, verifiable tasks).

Annecdotally, what we've found was that those using AI assistants show superficial improvements in productivity early, but they learn at a much slower rate and their understanding of the systems is fuzzy. It leads to lots of problems down the road. Senior folks are also susceptible to these effects, but at a lower level. We think it's because most of their experiences are old fashioned "natty" coding.

In a way, I think programmers need to do natty coding to train their brains before augmenting/amputating it with AI.

I do primarily when I'm refactoring something. In those scenarios, I know exactly what I want to change and the outcome is code in a style that I feel is most understandable. I don't need anything suggesting changes (I actually don't have tab completion enabled by default, I find it too distracting but that is a different topic) because the changes already exist in my head.

I used Copilot for about a week before turning it off out of frustration; immensely distracting, and about 50% of what it wanted to autocomplete was simply wrong.

A very large majority of the devs that I know and work with are still doing it the old way, or at least 90% the old way.

Agree that it is frustrating and not as satisfying to work using LLM's, I found myself on a plane recently without internet and it was great coding with no LLM access. I feel like we will slowly figure out how to use them in a reasonable way and it will likely involve doing smaller and more modular work, I disabled all tab auto suggestions because I noticed they throw me off track all the time.

I feel the same way. Vibe coding has taken away the joy of programming for me, but there’s no denying that it has indeed improved my efficiency. So now, it depends on the situation—if it’s just for fun, I’ll code it myself.

I don’t use LLMs either. I find them unethical and cumbersome.

Our company forbids ai, although I see my manager frequently popping into chatgpt for syntax stuff and I lowkey use google search AI functionality to bypass that req (not brazen enough to just use gpt)

I've been without work for over a year now so I'm still programming the classic way and using ai chats in the browser. When I'll work again I'll use them. I think the best thing to do is separate programming for work and pleasure.

There are dozens of us!

I have been thinking of writing ebooks on Retrocomputing Legacy Software like PowerBASIC 3.5, etc. Run them in DOSBOX/X and create DOS programs. People still use DOS but have no idea how to write programs. This was way before LLMs came out.

Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though?

Coding agents still give you control (at least for now), but are like having really good autocomplete. Instead of using copilot to complete a line or two, using something like Cursor you can generate a whole function or class based on your spec then you can refine and tweak the more nuanced and important bits where necessary.

For example, I was doing some UI stuff the other day and in the past it would have taken a while just to get a basic page layout together when you're writing it yourself, but with a coding assistant I generated a basic page asking it to use an image mock up, a component library and some other pages as references. Then I could get on and do the fun bits of building the more novel parts of the UI.

I mean if it's code you're working on for fun then work however you like, but I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025.