by omnicognate | 2026-01-11 13:13:59+00:00
> do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer

and from the first line of the article:

> I love writing software, line by line.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck.

Last time I commented this on HN, I said something like "if an AI could pluck these abstract ideas from my head and turn them into code, eliminating the typing part, I'd be an enthusiastic adopter", to which someone predictably said something like "but that's exactly what it does!". It absolutely is not, though.

When I "program" away from the keyboard I form something like a mental image of the code, not of the text but of the abstract structure. I struggle to conjure actual visual imagery in my head (I "have aphantasia" as it's fashionable to say lately), which I suspect is because much of my visual cortex processes these abstract "images" of linguistic and logical structures instead.

The mental "image" I form isn't some vague, underspecified thing. It corresponds directly to the exact code I will write, and the abstractions I use to compartmentalise and navigate it in my mind are the same ones that are used in the code. I typically evaluate and compare many alternative possible "images" of different approaches in my head, thinking through how they will behave at runtime, in what ways they might fail, how they will look to a person new to the codebase, how the code will evolve as people make likely future changes, how I could explain them to a colleague, etc. I "look" at this mental model of the code from many different angles and I've learned only to actually start writing it down when I get the particular feeling you get when it "looks" right from all of those angles, which is a deeply satisfying feeling that I actively seek out in my life independently of being paid for it.

Then I type it out, which doesn't usually take very long.

When I get to the point of "typing" my code "line by line", I don't want something that I can give a natural language description to. I have a mental image of the exact piece of logic I want, down to the details. Any departure from that is a departure from the thing that I've scrutinised from many angles and rejected many alternatives to. I want the exact piece of code that is in my head. The only way I can get that is to type it out, and that's fine.

What AI provides, and it is wildly impressive, is the ability to specify what's needed in natural language and have some code generated that corresponds to it. I've used it and it really is very, very good, but it isn't what I need because it can't take that fully-specified image from my head and translate it to the exact corresponding code. Instead I have to convert that image to vague natural language, have some code generated and then carefully review it to find and fix (or have the AI fix) the many ways it inevitably departs from what I wanted. That's strictly worse than just typing out the code, and the typing doesn't even take that long anyway.

I hope this helps to understand why, for me and people like me, AI coding doesn't take away the "line-by-line part" or the "typing". We can't slot it into our development process at the typing stage. To use it the way you are using it we would instead have to allow it to replace the part that happens (or can happen) away from the keyboard: the mental processing of the code. And many of us don't want to do that, for a wide variety of reasons that would take a whole other lengthy comment to get into.