I'm Going Back to Coding by Hand (Ask HN)

A text post on Hacker News in September 2026 by the user trencedamp, with 62 points and 52 comments when it was clipped. Only the post itself was captured, not the discussion, so this page covers one person's account.

The author has a successful app with a solid user base that they built alone. At their day job LLMs are used exclusively: "Nobody writes code anymore", and the team has a high-level understanding of how things work and no more. For about six months they had been building a new version of the side project with Claude, on and off, adding features at breakneck speed, until they realized they had no idea how the new code worked or what it changed or broke. At work an organization of other engineers shares that risk. On a project they had spent years on, alone, they did not want another vibe-coded black box.

So they abandoned the Claude branch with all its new features and started coding by hand again. The work was monotonous in places: renaming variables and chasing every reference, commenting out large sections to get something running and bringing them back one piece at a time. It was also very satisfying, and the image they reach for is the post's centre: "it felt like coming home to an untidy house after living in hotels for half a year, and starting to clean up. Yeah there's work to do, but this place is mine. My own. I know where things live."

Two results are reported. The project got their energy back, "at least for now". And reading code they had written before Claude, they still found ways to refactor it and make it more readable and efficient, which they take as proof that they had not forgotten how. They close by suggesting that anyone feeling they are losing their edge drop Claude for a few days and see how it feels.

Reading it

The contrast between the job and the side project is the useful part. At work, partial understanding is spread across a team and a company, which is the situation not-understanding-your-codebase defends as normal at scale. A solo project has nobody else holding any of the picture, so a black box there has no backstop. "I know where things live" is Naur's theory of the program in domestic terms, and six months of generated features were six months in which that theory stopped being updated.

The same moment of not understanding one's own project is where prolific-ai-psychosis says the illusion broke for its author, and it is the lost situational picture that ironies-of-automation describes for operators taking over an automated plant. The relief at finding the old skill intact is the check Bainbridge worried later generations would fail. building-syntaqlite-ai follows a similar abandon-and-rewrite arc, but Maganti kept AI in the second phase with himself as architect, where this author put it down entirely. It is one post, early, with the author's own "your mileage may vary" attached.