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Small programming tricks

681 points · 294 comments · signa11

  1. behnamoh · · focus · HN ↗
    This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good.

    I remember learning a lot of these programming tricks over the years. They would give me happiness: learning something new about nvim, or some new shortcut in the Fish shell, or a new Vim macro, or the difference between 1 bracket or 2 brackets in Bash scripts, etc. But now it seems like all of them are irrelevant, and I wanted to see how others think about the situation.

    1. catlifeonmars · · focus · HN ↗
      I hand code entirely at work still, while almost all of my colleagues do not and I am still able to keep up. I do use coding agents on personal projects, but have not felt the impetus to switch to agent based coding at work.

      I don’t mean this to brag, mostly to point out that in my line of work, actually writing the code is not the biggest bottleneck.

      For context I work on greenfield network security appliances

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