A little bit of hand coding is called for today as a combative manoeuvre against an increasing risk of brain rot. Similar to a pensioner learning to play a musical instrument at age 80 in an attempt to ward off dementia.
I mean, it still feels magical having agentic AI rattle through my codebase fixing defects or adding in using/readonly statements to make CodeQL happy. It really is magic to watch and quite a feat of modern engineering.
But over time it’s also felt more and more like watching my daughter having a driving lesson from the back seat of the car. We know how to drive, we nod and smile approvingly, but it’s from behind a glass separator. All whilst our own ability to reverse parallel park becomes rusty.
So. Today it’s a little coding without CoPilot, without ChatGPT or Claude. But still with a little intellisense for prompting of method names and overloaded parameters. Just me, Visual Studio, and C#. Familiar in each other’s company, once again. Long may that continue.
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