Manual Coding Is Dead
Stop looking at the code. Close your editors; the models don’t need them.
I have seen a lot of “coding is dead” and “coding is alive and well” posts in the last few months, and I now think both categories are missing the point. The typical ‘dead’ argument goes something like “agents can now write the code, so software engineers are doomed”. The typical ‘alive’ argument says “software engineers do a lot of things, and agents don’t do all of those things, so we’re fine”. I’m honestly not sure if we’re doomed or fine, but I suspect it’s neither: things are changing dramatically, and trying to explain a divergent future in terms of today’s jobs (or the past 50 years of them) isn’t going to work very well.
I need a term for the old-school way of coding, the one where you open a text editor and type the code, one character at a time. I propose we call it manual coding. I’ll also include in this category variants such as “first read the code in the editor and then use a tool (agent or refactor button) to edit the code”. Basically, if you’re still opening an editor, you’re coding manually. And if you’re still reading the code that was produced, you’re reviewing manually.
I strongly believe that manual coding is dead. Looking at the code is more and more akin to looking at the assembly: a few people actually need to do it, but the vast majority of us do not. If you take away just one thing from this essay, let it be this: stop looking at the code. If you’re still doing it, you’re wasting your time, and you’re missing out on the biggest productivity multiplier since compilers were introduced. Close your editors; the models don’t need them.
I think I understand at least some of the resistance to letting go of the code. I spent my entire 20-year career as an IC because I liked the code. I did this for fun and professional pride. Few days felt as good as the ones spent entirely immersed in a hard problem, coming out on the other side with an elegant solution that you could proudly show your peers. It felt great when someone understood you, when they recognized the craft. Product people and business people may not have cared, but the coders did. You could look at 50 lines of code and say “this is beautiful”. So when I say “you have to let it go”, you say “but what of the beauty”? The beauty is for us, the old guard. You had to be there. The new generations will never see it.
The primary reason you have to stop manually coding is simple: the SOTA LLMs (Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 as of this writing) are now better than us. Modesty aside, I think I’m a great coder. I went to two ACM ICPC world finals, I built Bing’s crawler scheduler, Facebook’s audio calling, Snap’s push notifications backend and OpenAI’s connectors. I worked with some of the best engineers in the world and I held my own. And even with those credentials, I think the LLMs code better than me. They’re more knowledgeable, more creative, and more precise. Even if they took just as long as I took to type the code, you should probably still take their code over mine (for a sufficiently well-defined task). But on top of all that, they are orders of magnitude faster. They do in minutes what would take me a day, and in hours what would take me a week or more. And they charge a lot less than I did per hour.
If you take this advice and stop manually coding, you will soon find new challenges: writing good specs, verifying the agents’ work, designing good architectures, and designing good UIs. This partially explains the “alive and well” camp, because these skills matter today. Agents still need help sometimes, but they often do not need any help. Models got much better in the last few months and they’ll continue getting better. And a lot of people, myself included, have been spending time building harnesses to address these deficiencies at a higher level of abstraction. So I don’t think you should take it for granted that those other skills will retain value.
If you read this far, it may seem that I’m saying that software engineering is dead. My main disagreement with the doomers camp is that the software doesn’t just appear out of thin air. Someone must will it to exist, and keep poking at it until it has the right shape and is delivered to the right people. The general business prompt to an all-powerful agent (“make me some money”) is unsatisfying and undifferentiated, and humans will continue thriving by trying to shape the world to match their preferences and judgment. We just won’t be typing much in the process.
I hope to write more frequently about this subject. In my next post, I’ll write a case study based on Retirement Lab, a 200k LOC app that I built and shipped solo in two months with the immense help of Claude Max and Codex Pro subscriptions. If you’re not convinced by this first essay, perhaps a few examples and statistics will help.