Don't Be Discouraged to Code by Hand
Am allowed to learn Lua now?
If you struggle to ...
- spend time on a hobby if it is not productive (e.g. reading a novel for fun)
- invest time on something that you won't use later (e.g. reading a novel for fun)
- enjoy an activity purely for its own sake (e.g. reading a novel for fun)
I know how you feel.
People will tell us, "just have fun, who cares". It doesn't matter. We'll still feel guilty. We need to give ourselves permission!
And these AGENTS!! They make us feel guilty about programming by rendering all our past victories pointless!
Why learn vim? You won't be typing code by hand anyway. Why learn a new language? Your agents are right there. Just make it write Rust, compile to WASM and deploy everywhere! Why learn Lua? Do you think you'll ever touch neovim again?
These thoughts heavily discouraged me from learning. They made me forget how fun it is to code. I had actually forgotten.
We don't have to go over the benefits of agentic coding. You know it, I know it, all these companies laying people off by the truckload know it.
But do feel I think popular sentiment is shifting. Developers are starting to feel the maintenance tax (1, 2). I too find that leaning too hard into agentic development makes your product a black box. It's the kind of thing you only believe once you've lived it.
What I want to say is:
Once we acknowledge the maintenance tax of agentic coding, manual coding can be justified. If human intervention is necessary for long term maintenance, reading Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought becomes a productive activity.
You don't have to convince anyone. You just have to convince yourself, you productivity/building/growing/BM maniac.
If you haven't written code by hand for a while, trust me and try it. You'll realize you had forgotten how fun it is.
I still use agents, especially for zero-to-one research code. But I no longer believe that every hour spent improving my own hands is wasted.
Maybe manual coding, learning new languages, and writing neovim configs in Lua will become pointless in the future. Maybe better agent tooling in the future – not human intervention – will be the answer to the maintenance tax.
I only now realize: we are not there yet. (Yay!)