Reason #1 to keep writing code by hand is that you don't ever lose that connection between you and the code.

There was an excellent post here on HN that unfortunately went unnoticed. I highly recommend reading it as it exactly points out this problem: understanding.

Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128468

Learning is the bottleneck for shipping code. Building the model in your head, feeling out the edge cases and system interactions, and understanding the intricacies. Typing out the code is a small part of the process.

So, if you want to speed things up with LLMs, the bulk of the speed comes from reducing learning.

Code by hand? The good old fashioned way? Might be "less efficient", but you will understand what you did and build experience.

Imo if you’re reprompting you’re losing. If the agent oneshots the task its good but if it doesn’t manage it on the first try you will get there faster by doing it yourself.

I feel the same a bit. I'm learning how to use agent harnesses and how to get them to work on problems I have with projects.

But it very often feels like brute forcing the solution, and I'm not a big fan of it.

But maybe I'm using it wrong.

Isn't this what /goal was meant for? Claude will bash _itself_ into reaching the goal.