If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed, coding by hand probably makes more sense. At least it keeps your brain engaged.
But the right move is to find a way to increase the rate at which you generate ideas and offload the coding almost entirely to AI. Because if you’re not doing that, someone else is. They’ll eventually build something better than your app.
And when people stop choosing your product, if you can’t come up with the next idea and this is your only source of income... well, good luck.
If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed
For me, it definitely is. Hell, my idea generation outpaces my ability to delegate it to agents. I can't do all the things I want to do because I don't have enough time in the day to vocalise them all, let alone hand code.
But in my case, I choose to handcode sometimes because I value the certainty of the results more than the speed of development.
It's the choice between a well-engineered application that does a handful of things reliably through a well-tested UI, or a rough-around-the-edges app that does 50 different things passably well, most of the time, with an inconsistent UI and lots of small bugs
People here might question the "lots of small bugs" but I have developed some apps solely with LLMs and despite using test-suites and spec-driven development I still face constant regression and UI bugs creeping in with every revision.
A good example - in React Native, in Android, Claude cannot keep the controls above where the onscreen nav appears, no matter how many times I ask it to. It'll solve it until three iterations later when the issue will return on another screen.
Comments
If your idea generation isn’t outpacing your implementation speed, coding by hand probably makes more sense. At least it keeps your brain engaged.
But the right move is to find a way to increase the rate at which you generate ideas and offload the coding almost entirely to AI. Because if you’re not doing that, someone else is. They’ll eventually build something better than your app.
And when people stop choosing your product, if you can’t come up with the next idea and this is your only source of income... well, good luck.
For me, it definitely is. Hell, my idea generation outpaces my ability to delegate it to agents. I can't do all the things I want to do because I don't have enough time in the day to vocalise them all, let alone hand code.
But in my case, I choose to handcode sometimes because I value the certainty of the results more than the speed of development.
It's the choice between a well-engineered application that does a handful of things reliably through a well-tested UI, or a rough-around-the-edges app that does 50 different things passably well, most of the time, with an inconsistent UI and lots of small bugs
People here might question the "lots of small bugs" but I have developed some apps solely with LLMs and despite using test-suites and spec-driven development I still face constant regression and UI bugs creeping in with every revision.
A good example - in React Native, in Android, Claude cannot keep the controls above where the onscreen nav appears, no matter how many times I ask it to. It'll solve it until three iterations later when the issue will return on another screen.