Ask HN: Is writing code by hand still a necessary skill for developers?
Is the future of development just using AI agents to orchestrate everything and just reviewing, debugging, giving specs, verifying, etc...?
Rest of the information:
I’m a full-stack "developer" trying to understand my career in the age of AI.
I didn’t study CS, so I have a non-traditional background. I've also never worked with other developers until recently. I came from graphic design/web dev work (Wordpress, CSS, some JS, some PHP), did HTML email development for a bit (awful black magic), scripting/automations to help a content migration for a year, and now I have a full-stack role at a small company.
I now work with everything. Backend, frontend, infrastructure, CI/CD, integrations. Mostly "Hey this is broken" - my job is to fix it. I understand some of the fundamentals well enough to be productive. I can read code, improve it (usually), and mostly explain what needs to happen. I've been able to migrate their system into Azure on my own, handle some larger projects... I refactored their their payment system to integrate with Stripe. I've been pretty productive, to the point where I've gotten a promotion / title change.
But, I’m laughably bad at writing code. I feel like a total fraud. I came up in my early career at probably the worst time.
If you asked me to implement something simple without Claude or Codex, I’d struggle.
I was just getting started when ChatGPT came out, and since then I've never really needed to "learn to write code". It's mostly prompting and tweaking slightly from there. Things have been moving so fast I never really sat down and learned to write code. I have the books, I've read them, I've done some of the exercises, but obviously when I have a full time job, I'm mostly focused on that and keeping my personal life in order.