The Main Advantage Of Coding "The Old Way" Over AI-Assisted Coding
20 Apr 2026 #codingTyping out code is already the old way.
Last week, I stumbled upon I’m Coding By Hand. Its subtitle got my attention: “I’m spending 3 months coding the old way.”
The old way of coding
The future of coding is already here.
Decades ago, we punched cards. For so long, we’ve been typing out symbols inside IDEs. That’s now “the old way.”
Maybe the future is AI specs via brain implants. Who knows!
What you miss when coding with AI
The post made an excellent distinction between old coding vs AI-assisted coding.
“when writing code ‘by hand’ I was actually doing two things: writing what I wanted and learning the codebase…if I didn’t know what I wanted exactly, coding agents would be happy to make many assumptions for me. This almost always meant that I didn’t learn as much, and that I wouldn’t have a good grasp of the codebase.”
Coding isn’t just typing.
It’s decoding business rules or problem constraints to then encode them into a programming language, while
- Mastering its syntax and rules,
- Making the new coding artifacts interact with existing ones,
- Following the structure and conventions of the codebase,
- Learning about the business domain,
- And of course, solving the problem at hand.
Maybe with AI, we may lose some of those activities. If AI writes 90% of code, being a polyglot isn’t valuable anymore.
In the meantime, every AI-generated line of code we don’t understand isn’t just technical debt. It’s cognitive debt.
AI is like a powerful calculator: only useful if you know the math. To help you level up your coding skills—AI-assisted coding or old school—check out Street-Smart Coding. The roadmap I wish I had starting out.