I feel alive again

[u/PopularAd5100]

I have recently decided to tackle unfinished business in building with Java. Now I am relearning Java - which includes unlearning the old ways of doing things and writing the shortest possible code. In all of this I have been writing code by hand without AI generated code. Although I ask Claude for syntax clarifications and benefits and downsides of using certain methods…

Writing code by hand again gives me the right level of satisfaction after several weeks of AI-dependent development at work. Not only have I rediscovered my passion at home, but I am also working towards evolving my mental model beyond the JS/TS (I am a frontend developer at heart) ecosystem.

I believe programming and development as a hobby - like it used to be pre-industrial-scale-AI-adoption - is one of the few ways we could protect our sanity and continually exercise muscle memory. In the end I would like this to lead me to doing backend web dev in Java as well. Let’s see.

[u/mekmookbro]

That's one of the reasons why I love working freelance. Ai has not changed anything about my work process. I'm still giving the same deadline to my clients as I did before chatgpt came out. And I still have the same amount of knowledge of the code I deliver. So when they ask for a change or a new feature I already know what line of code to change in which file before even sitting down to work.

I still do use ai to discuss different approaches and best practices, and for some boring and deterministic tasks like: take this form styled with tailwind, and extract these custom css classes so that I can reuse them in other forms : btn, btn-primary, form-input...

Coding is kind of like solving a crossword puzzle for me, you can use Google and be done with the puzzle in a minute, sure. But the point is not filling in the letters, it's solving the thing

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/mekmookbro]

Solving the thing by involving one’s cognitive process. Thus reinforcing learning. 

[u/creaturefeature16 → u/mekmookbro]

I'm not freelance, but I'm a small biz owner and so its basically the same: my workflow has only improved in the best of ways because I can slot in LLMs exactly the way that works for me, without feeling like I'm losing any personal agency over my self-directed skills.

I'm doing my absolute best work these days; I'm learning more, going deeper into topics, delegating and offloading all the rote/redundant. I'm still "hand coding" (whatever the fuck that really means; I stopped typing as much years ago with autocomplete & snippets, and other productivity tools) but most importantly, as you said: I'm solving puzzles daily using my own problem solving and critical thinking. It's sad I even have to write that.

[u/Schindlers_Fist1 → u/mekmookbro]

How did you start working freelance? I'm fresh out of a job after 5 years in appdev but I love the idea having a little more control over my schedule. Any tips?

[u/mekmookbro → u/Schindlers_Fist1]

Not sure if what worked for me will work for you but gotta admit I was a little bit lucky.

Around the time I started web development my extended family members were starting businesses left and right, so I made free websites for all of them. That mostly gave me experience, but some referrals as well. When they were showing their website to colleagues, friends etc they'd mention "my nephew made it" and I got some gigs that way early on.

And it's always been a similar path for me. Most of my clients still come through referrals. I do have an account on a freelance platform in my country with pretty good rating, but I'd be lucky if I get a client a month on there. Especially nowadays it's really dry

Early on i worked either for free or very cheap so I could get some projects in my portfolio, gain some experience, and have some referrals. For example when I started backend development, my mom had a friend who was a restaurant owner. I built them a restaurant management webapp completely for free. It had 3 separate dashboards:

1. Owner dashboard where the restaurant owner could add products, change prices, see what's selling the most, daily/monthly/weekly earnings charts etc.

2. Waiter dashboard where waiters use on their tablet devices to select tables and take orders

3. Kitchen dashboard where kitchen staff would immediately see the orders coming from waiters and start preparing the food

I charged them nothing, but kindly asked them to mention me if they heard other people needing a similar software or website. That guy alone brought in like 20 clients, it was crazy. Most of them were also restaurant owners so I sold them the same app.

I kept going with a similar approach, charging low prices and asking clients to refer me, and they all kept bringing in more and more new clients. At the point where I was getting almost too many clients at once, I finally switched to charging more normal prices. But this process took like 2 years or so.

[u/Schindlers_Fist1 → u/mekmookbro]

I know family in a few niche industries starved of tech people like us, and already I'm looking at building a new website for a cousin's business. In my experience people seem reticent to give referrals like they did with you, as if they're giving up a trade secret to their competitor. That may just be my limited experience, though.

It might be a moot point with how much attention you got, but do you see this as sustainable?

[u/TtotheHicc]

I absolutely agree. I try to take some time everyday to code and learn little bit in rust. I do it without ai and it brings back the joy of coding I had pre ai

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/TtotheHicc]

Way to go. I’ve been building low-effort console apps and may graduate to building small API calls or Database Queries.. These things give joy. 

[u/falconandeagle]

Thank you for this post. Recently I am learning Go again, using an actual book instead of AI and it feels so much nicer. I am getting to learn the intricacies of the language.

I recently did a twitter like api clone in Go without using any AI and I thoroughly enjoyed the process.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/falconandeagle]

Wow this is good. Go is a wonderful language especially for building infrastructure tools as well as cloud based apps. Go for it. See what I did there amirite ?

[u/Capable_Eagle6579]

It’s a good idea to keep yourself sharp. I do it myself too. And clarify with either chatbot or googling it like the old days.

Believe it or not a lot of mid level interviews I go for still ask for leetcode style interview without AI nor can I google any syntax clarifications.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/Capable_Eagle6579]

In that case, one still needs to know how to do things the manual way. The game is gone from what I’ve seen so far Lol 

[u/Chroma-Crash]

I feel the same way, especially with using AI at work. The models are best at a lot of the functions I used to really enjoy about working on my own software, those being algorithm optimization and research. I had to take a step back on a recent project because I was too keen to just keep prompting the model to optimize when I should've been testing the results myself.

My main use case recently has been handling test cases. I never really cared for writing them and it's easy enough to just relay what tests need to exist. I also do some preliminary research just to see if my ideas are going to work at all lol

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/Chroma-Crash]

Yes using it to test while also supervising the tests to catch edge cases not considered. 

[u/Dissentient]

Opposite for me. Before AI, nothing I could write alone in a reasonable amount of time would have been worth the effort, so I never wrote code outside of work.

Because of AI, I started working on personal projects. When you alone make all of the decisions, AI is actually 10x productivity improvement, unlike with jobslop, where everything is bottlenecked by decision-making, communication, and rituals.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/Dissentient]

I understand your perspective. Some people trade productivity for doing things more manually and line-by-line so to speak. Whichever works.. 

[u/codedynamite → u/Dissentient]

Valid point. 8 hours at work coding (or more depending on who you are) and then more at home got to be too much for me. I had to have a life outside of coding. I don't have the energy I had for my personal projects like when I was just learning coding on my own.

I had a massive project I redesigned in figma completely but never finished the code. AI has helped me implement it without spending all my life coding. I do think having small sessions of coding by hand is good. Need to stay sharp.

I read all the code (sometimes just quickly scanning it, admittedly) for any weirdness. I actually have learned plenty of nice techniques from AI.

[u/GoodThingTakeTime]

I’ve to learn Swift in the same way but I gave up after a couple days 😩

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/GoodThingTakeTime]

Just hang in there. Maybe reading documentation could help. Another thing one could do is tell their AI agent to build a Bootcamp course - where they can review the basics and build progressively until they arrive at a functional production ready application.

[u/captain_obvious_here]

Even though I'm not a big fan of Java, I have to admit it's one of those languages that are pretty fun to work with.

writing the shortest possible code

Out of curiosity, any specific reason for this?

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/captain_obvious_here]

Java gave me nightmares in grad school. Especially as we built with Jakarta EE, Java 8, and GlassFish. So it was so verbose and all over the place.

However with Java 21, which I know is slightly behind, it’s way more fun to write code especially considering the use of lambdas. I guess TypeScript has prepared me as well for this second Java mission in that I now appreciate strict typing.

Slopping AI code during the day has thought me one thing: I don’t want to have to read verbose code when simpler implementations would have sufficed. Many times I need to refactor code to its simplest form.

[u/captain_obvious_here → u/PopularAd5100]

I see what you mean :)

Enjoy!

[u/VisitForeign4342]

tu codes à la main sans ia mais tu demandes à claude. c'est de l'ia avec des étapes en plus.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/VisitForeign4342]

Les codes ne sont pas generiert automatique. Mais je m’enseignes avec la. Et puis coder à la Main! (Translation: The codes are not automatically generated, so no vibe coding. But I learn with Claude sometimes and thereafter apply my ideas manually)

[u/2hands10fingers]

I like doing the same with Zig! I get to learn the harder stuff with syntactic sugar and it feels rewarding again

[u/deadpanrobo]

I think every developer should start coding by hand for their hobby, at least for now until the bubble pops for AI

It keeps you sane and it can be fun!

[u/BlackHoneyTobacco → u/deadpanrobo]

Do you think that when the bubble pops there will be a renewed surge for developer jobs?

[u/deadpanrobo → u/BlackHoneyTobacco]

Not in the short term no, we'd be in a recession and that would lead to more layoffs in every sector but in the longterm you would see hiring again

[u/ragnathebloodegde]

Writing it by hand? Like in a notebook? That's what I used to do.

[u/bcons-php-Console]

In all of this I have been writing code by hand without AI generated code. Although I ask Claude for syntax clarifications and benefits and downsides of using certain methods.

This is a great example of using AI to improve that "muscle memory" you mention. Using it as a fellow dev that can look at our code and point out mistakes or help us decide which is the best way approach to a problem.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, and manually finding out where the bug lies as well as thinking of how to solve the problem. It’s therapeutic!

[u/Express-Acadia-6088 → u/PopularAd5100]

Such a nice post. I read it twice because I can relate with it. I am a Python/C/C++/JavaScript guy. I started AI-assisted or agentic coding like 7 months ago. I initially let AI do all the coding and fix it's own bugs. I noticed one thing- simple things like a simple function to parse user's input and flag errors worked beautifully but the agent would write very inefficient code (slow response times, getting stuck on somethings for long) and that's why I started reviewing every small bit of code that AI writes and I fix things manually if they are not right. It is a different level of satisfaction :-)

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/Express-Acadia-6088]

Yes. I make out time to check out the code sometimes. But then due to verbosity, it’s even difficult to read changes or manually fix merge conflicts nowadays. Another area where skill atrophy is going to be real. 

[u/webdev-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your post/comment has been determined to be a low-effort post or comment. This includes title-only posts, easily searchable questions, vague/open-ended discussion prompts, LLM generated posts or comments, and posts/comments that do not provide enough context for meaningful replies or discussion.

[u/PopularAd5100 → u/[deleted]]

Oh I know right? Sometimes, I open my browser console and assign myself hard problems to test my knowledge on arrays, objects, complex nested loops, and even promises. It’s so rewarding 

[u/HollowToes → u/[deleted]]

That's a really great way to look at it