Ask HN: How to get back into programming without AI? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to get back into programming without AI?

9 pointscoolcoder61321 comments

It's been a long time since I've written code without AI, and I miss it. How can I get back into it without ending up reaching for AI?

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- Remove AI from your editor completely. - Start a project which is easy and fun for you,something you did when first learning to code. Text-based adventure game, or some silly little app that is just for fun. - Or take a new language or some aspect of coding, that you have only brushed over, but want to learn better, and learn it properly by doing coding exercises or some silly project that teaches you the syntax etc. - Most importantly relearn how fun coding is

I use Claude only to ask questions (in separate virtual desktop, no chat inside the editor) if I can’t grokk the doc’s or find the answer online. This keeps the LLM input valuable, but not using it as a crutch, and me honest and learning constantly.

  1. I don't have AI in my editor in the first place, mostly use web chat with a bit of gemini CLI
  2. Good ideas; worth considering
  3. I'll pass
  4. That is my goal

I think the last time I really tried to code by hand was a temporal clock. I thought it would be simple but I bit off more than I could chew math-wise. The last time I was sucessful (as far as I can remember) was a small PR to a game mod manager.

Here's the bullet list of the above comment, properly formatted:

- Remove AI from your editor completely.

- Start a project which is easy and fun for you, something you did when first learning to code. Text-based adventure game, or some silly little app that is just for fun.

- Or take a new language or some aspect of coding, that you have only brushed over, but want to learn better, and learn it properly by doing coding exercises or some silly project that teaches you the syntax etc.

- Most importantly relearn how fun coding is

You can also use an indented (code) block

    - Remove AI from your editor completely.
    - Start a project which is easy and fun for you, something you did when first learning to code. Text-based adventure game, or some silly little app that is just for fun.
    - Or take a new language or some aspect of coding, that you have only brushed over, but want to learn better, and learn it properly by doing coding exercises or some silly project that teaches you the syntax etc.
    - Most importantly relearn how fun coding is

Earlier we used to walk... Then we invented wheels. Now we can fly! Doesn't mean we forget to walk? We just need to... walk...! I think its the same with AI. It offers us engineering productivity, so we go for it.

Now the problem I would face by doing this is, accomplishing less in more time, instead of accomplishing more in less time. I am not questioning why... but if we want to do things old school, I'd say don't restrict yourself from using AI to do mundane tasks like setting up the environment or writing tests..

You can still focus on writing the main business logic yourself. Read documentation, start off with the examples.. And play with mutations of function calls to explore the technology. Build a mental map of what you are trying to do! But type the logic out yourself. Write your first Class. Second will follow.. and third. !

I myself is an ADHD guy and that is how I start with. The first one is always difficult.

I get the feeling. But what I actually missed was the flow state, not the typing. Once I started using AI for the parts I don't enjoy (boilerplate, test setup, config files) and kept the design and architecture for myself, I got that feeling back. I'm coding more now than before AI, just spending my time on the interesting parts. Maybe try offloading the stuff you find yourself doing over and over that isn't that interesting

- Would you like to do that for a fun? - just do.

- Would you like to do that to encrease quality - build architecture manually and then ask AI to refine and code it, add more automation testing with help of AI.

Tell why you would like to do that, the answers can be different.

For fun, for personal projects.

What kind of music player features are you thinking? That actually sounds like a solid project — niche enough that nothing existing does it exactly right.

Block the AI at the router level, embrace the pain, and go suffer in low level programming. It’s cheaper than therapy.

I wrote my side projects with as little AI as possible. You can still do it in VSCode AFAIK. But this is just for fun.

there was a link on HK to the article about building writebook (from the legacy laptop) i guess you need similar setup but for coding: simple editor eg vim, offline docs, that's it

but honest it's better to move forward and learn how to delivery value without hand-written code at all, seems it has more prospects

we never turn back time

This is a genuine question, to get more context:

What's stopping you from programming without AI?

The conflict between wanting the result versus wanting to program. The result tends to win out. Instant gratification, in short. If I want something enough to not lose interest when programming it myself, I usually want it enough to forego programming it myself in favour of having it earlier.

It sounds like you just don't want to write code by hand then. You prefer instant gratification over writing code yourself. You said you miss programming without AI, my read here is that you do not have a strong desire to program without AI. Both things can be true, there's no dichotomy here.

Not exactly, that's more due to the projects. Let's say I want a music player with scrolling lyrics, I have a greater desire to have and use that music player than I do to build it. If there was a music player that already did exactly what I wanted I would use that. I think that might be a good way to put it: What I may be looking for is a project that I would build even if it already existed.

What helped me is to stop paying for AI subscriptions, as well as removing any AI editor from VSCode. It's rather hard at the beginning, but once you realize how much fun you've been missing all this time, it's easy to keep going. Of course, once in a while when I'm really stuck and I can ask ChatGPT for a hint, but only for learning purposes. I feel like not using AI at all is not a good idea because it's definitely not going anywhere. It might save some time occasionally for really boring stuff, but I think we shouldn't use it for more than 20% of our coding time. It only leads to deterioration of our cognitive abilites that we worked so hard to acquire. Good luck.

Experts Exchange is still with us :)

Start by setting a timer or a limit

How so?

I don’t think the goal should necessarily be “without AI,” but more “without depending on AI before thinking through the problem yourself.”

One thing that helped me was forcing myself to: - design architecture first - debug manually for a while - read docs before prompting - use AI more like a reviewer than an autopilot

The fun part of programming for me was always the problem-solving loop, and it’s easy to accidentally skip that now.

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