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

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.

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

There are dozens of us!

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.

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.