hi everyone,

wanted to throw a topic out here for some genuine discussion, and honestly, to seek some guidance.

just a brief intro: i'm a developer from asia, currently in my 6th year of programming. for the longest time, i was a firm believer in manual crafting—what we call "手搓" (shou cuo) here, meaning writing every single line of code by hand. that was until last year when i started using claude heavily.

before moving forward, i should probably mention that due to cultural or regional differences, i might not be fully familiar with some of the specific nuances or unwritten norms of this forum yet. if i break any implicit etiquette, please let me know, i'm here to learn and discuss.

getting back to the point: over the past year or two, almost everyone around me has started using AI like crazy. it ranges from throwing a single test case to the LLM, to completely refactoring a massive production project. there's no denying that AI boosts velocity immensely, but it has also brought me a lot of confusion and deep thinking.

do we still need to stick with hand-written code? i've been feeling quite lost about this.

initially, i rejected it entirely. back then i was using codeium, which, to be frank, felt pretty dumb at the time . but then the generative AI boom happened, and suddenly the corporate world here was hit by an "AI-first" storm.

in many workplaces now, no one seems to care about code quality anymore. as long as the code runs and can be delivered quickly, it's considered fine. a lot of folks started aggressive "nei-juan" (内卷—a term we use for toxic internal competition ) just to hit KPIs. it’s no longer a competition of technical depth, but rather a race of who can deliver faster and cheaper.

under this kind of intense ecosystem pressure, i started questioning everything again: is it still worth it to hand-craft code and try to maintain absolute, line-by-line control over the project's architecture and cadence?

don't get me wrong, i am a heavy AI user myself now. ( , but i probably consumed over a billion tokens in the past months to build up my projects). what AI actually taught me was structure and discipline—making my docs and layout at least look organized and clean. but of course, dealing with hallucinations remains the biggest nightmare.

i'm genuinely caught in the middle of this shift. how do you guys balance this in your day-to-day work? is the control-freak nature of a low-level engineer still valued in an AI-driven industry?

would love to hear your thoughts and philosophies on this. thank you!

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