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

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.

What do you want to hear about? Doing things the same old way continues to work in the same old way. I may be a dinosaur, but I hear La Brea is nice this time of year.

I've tried new things occasionally, and I keep going back to a text editor and a shell window to run something like Make. It's probably not the most efficient process, but it works for everything and there's value in that. I have no interest in a tool that will generate lots of code for me that may or may not be correct and I'll have to go through with a fine tooth comb to see; I can personally generate lots of code that may or may not be correct, and if that fails, I have run some projects as copy-paste snippets from stack overflow until it works; it's not my idea of a good time, but I think it was better than spending the time to understand the many layers of OSX when all I wanted to do was get a pixel value from a point on the screen into applescript and I didn't want to do any other OSX ever (and I haven't).

Most of the engineers I know played around with LLMs but are still doing their work without one. Myself, I sometimes pop in to Gemini webapp to ask a question if search isn't going well, and it helps about 25% of the time.

Yes, because AI can really ruin your design philosophy for your approached to problem that's being solved for a decade, and you are trying different way.

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.

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.

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 am a part-time coder, in that I get paid for coding and some of my code is actually used in production. I don't use LLMs or any AI in my coding, whatsoever. I've never tried LLM or AI coding, and I never will, guaranteed. I hate AI.

I agree with you, 100%. I like typing out code by hand. I like referring to the Python docs and I like the feeling of slowly putting code together and figuring out the building blocks, one by one. In my mind, AI is about efficiency for the sake of efficiency, not for the sake of enjoyment, and I enjoy programming,

Furthermore, I think AI embodies the model of the human being as a narrowly-scoped tool who gets converted from creator into a replaceable component, whose only job is to provide conceptual input into design. Sound good at first ("computers do the boring stuff, humans do the creative stuff"), but, and it's a big but: as an artist too, I think it's absolutely true that the creative stuff can't be separated from the "boring" stuff, and when looked at properly, the "boring" stuff can actually become serene.

I know there's always the counterpoint: what about other automations? Well, I think there is a limit past which automations give diminishing returns and become counterproductive, and therefore we need to be aware of all automations, but AI is the first sort of automation that is categorically always past the point of diminishing returns, because it targets exactly the sort of cognitive features that we should be doing ourselves.

Most people here disagree with me, and frequently downvote me too on the topic of AI. But I'll say this: in a world where efficiency and productivity has become doctrine, most people have also been converted into only thinking about the advancement of the machine, and have lost the essence of soul to enjoy that which is beyond mere mental performance.

Sadly, people in the tecnhnical domain often find emotional satisfaction in new tools, and that is why anything beyond the technical is often derided by those in tech, much to their disadvantage.

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.

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

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'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.

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)

If you mean "AI" in the sense of reasoning LLM, than it is generally prohibited given the industrial scale plagiarism, security leaks, and logical inaccuracies.

For the philosophical insights into ethics... we may turn to fiction =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q

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.