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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 On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good.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. elendilm · · focus · HN ↗
      People in academia generally doesn't code much. So I am not surprised.

      LLM's have not affected us in the slightest when it comes to coding. Maybe we write a snippet, post it for llm to scrutinize, and usually LLMs spout bullshit and wrong suggestions and after enough verbal abuse it points to some issues with the code.

      But I don't get this delegation to LLM's for your entire coding. I hope everyone delegates to LLM :) (sarcasm)

      1. bitwize · · focus · HN ↗
        so are you a time traveller from like, 2023 or something?
        1. elendilm · · focus · HN ↗
          You must be from 2029. How is the cost and technical debt looking over there?

          Here in 2026, we are trying hard to reduce those. Here economics still punishes us for bad decisions. In 2026, some of us use LLMs as a tool and not as the brain.

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