Hand-coding will never die

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen the funeral procession make its slow, lurching way in our direction. The software industry has been publicly grieving. Our way of life is changing. It’s scary. Everything we know about our jobs is shifting beneath us.

What does it mean to code anymore? Isn’t prompting more akin to product management than software engineering? Why does building feel so unsatisfying? Is coding dead?

Well, I’m not burying it yet, because I don’t believe hand-coding is going to die.

No, not “I don’t believe hand-coding is going to die this year.” I don’t believe hand-coding is going to die at all.

Why the confidence? It’s simple. I knit. In 2026.

When you look at old photographs, what do you notice?

For me, it’s that people used to dress well. They’d have maybe five good outfits, if they were lucky. But each item was handmade out of high-quality wool, cotton, and linen. No microplastics in sight.

People paid a lot for their clothes, either with their own manual labor, or by buying something handmade, at handmade prices. Hence the maximum of five outfits.

Not so anymore. What do you do when you have a special event coming up? A graduation or baby shower or a cousin’s wedding might merit a trip to the strip mall, or maybe 2-day shipping.

You can be an “outfit repeater” now. You can go on Temu or Shein and buy a sweater for $13.99.

Do you know how long it takes to hand-knit a sweater? I do. It’s a labor of love. It’s monotonous. It’s rhythmic. It’s addictive. It takes 6-12 weeks.

And even still, I knit. Not because I need to. Thanks to the industrial revolution, and the Internet, and the credit card, I can have whatever outfit I want on my doorstep within the week. I knit because I want to. I knit because it’s a fun challenge.

Coding will end up like this, after all of this settles.

Remember how, during the industrial revolution, they had to figure out child labor laws and factory safety? They made lots of mistakes. People lost limb and life. They had to learn the hard way.

There’s an industrial revolution happening now in the software industry. We can make all sorts of knitted garments (apps) in record time with our newfangled machines (AI tools). It’s cheaper than ever before, too. Pick an app, any app. You can have it in an hour.

But this industrial revolution is awkward, and difficult, and we have to figure out where to draw boundaries and ethical lines. We have to fight the same forces as before: greed, the power hungry, and even the change-resistant. Someday we’ll know better. Until then, it’s just hard.

We’re at the stage of this “industrial revolution” where it’s not cool to knit your own clothes—that is to say, code your own apps.

Hand-coding, right now, is a marker of being behind the curve. In some cases, it’s a sign that you’re unable to purchase a subscription to the latest models. If you don’t adapt to the new wave, you’re not going to make it. And this is true! We can’t cling onto the Old Way. The Old Way is what’s dying.

But there’s nuance to it.

Software engineering is mostly done via an agent now. There are Agent Skills, MCP servers, and Agent-friendly CLIs, and agents can run circles around you.

And… hand coding is still not dead. It’s immortal, actually.

You can tell the difference between a hand-knit sweater and a mass-produced one. If you’re a knitter, you can see it from a mile away. But even if you’ve never picked up two needles and a ball of yarn, you can probably tell.

In a mass-produced garment, the fabric might be a little see-through. It doesn’t survive decades of wear and tear. There are only a few sizes; it’s not custom fit to your body. You can’t decide to adjust the sleeves a bit, or pull in the waist some as you go. In a word, the difference between a handmade garment and a mass-produced one is craft.

So it is with coding. A lot of vibe coded websites look the same. They use the same building blocks, remixed just enough to not be exactly identical. They lack the human touch that makes them feel premium: an extra animation here, or a bespoke design choice there.

The code is oftentimes less elegant, too. An LLM doesn’t feel that confident, settled feeling of accomplishment when they write a particularly beautiful method. It’s all the same to them: a transaction, a job, not an art.

The human touch is elegance, craft, and care, both in knitting and coding.

There’s another human touch, though, too. It’s kind of just… the opposite of what I just described.

The human touch is also imperfection.

A craft teacher at my local library told me once, “if you wanted a perfect project, you should have bought it at Home Goods.” If you want a website that fits in with all the others, you can just generate it at the LLM store.

Typos are the new marker of humanity. Just like uneven edges make a knit scarf look handmade, mistakes and unpredictability and original thoughts are all markers of humanity. An unexpected wood grain gives a handmade table depth and soul. Synthetic wood can never mimic this randomness well enough.

There’s some Celtic folklore that says that as you work on a knitting project, you weave part of your soul into the fabric. To prevent your soul from being trapped inside, you should make a small, almost imperceptible mistake. The mistakes are part of what makes the work whole.

Hand-coding adds character, too. If you’ve ever looked at code you wrote 6 months ago, you know what I’m talking about. The code itself has perplexing workarounds that you’d never make if you just knew about this one JavaScript feature. Regardless of all the linting and formatting you do to make it match your team’s style, parts of it still feel like you.

The initials that we etch into the tree to prove that “I was here” are both extremes. It’s both craft and imperfection. It’s containing multitudes.

It’s not just grandmas who knit now. Did you know that?

There’s a thriving community of 20-something year-olds sharing chic patterns they’ve designed, inspired by current fashion trends. I follow a knitting influencer who’s a 45 year-old truck driver. From the cab of his truck, he happily discusses yarn preferences and needle sizes with his audience.

Knitting is an ancient craft. Knitting is a current trend.Knitting is resilient. Coding will be resilient, too.

Why did knitting survive the industrial revolution? Maybe a historian will correct me. My best, uninformed guess, is that people loved it enough to preserve it. Grandmas taught their grandkids to make scrappy scarves in bright colors. The library crafting class organizers brought people together around a shared hobby, and provided a safe place to learn and make mistakes. Someone posted a YouTube tutorial that helped someone else across the world, from another culture, in another time.

If we love coding, we’ll help preserve it.

We’ll continue to teach, even when view counts are low and it feels like we’re shouting into the void.

We’ll continue to build STEM robot kits with our kids, in an effort to share magical coding moments with younger generations.

We’ll hand-code apps, spending weeks on a website that an LLM could generate in 5 minutes. Not out of necessity. Because we can.

I’m not ready to bury hand-coding. It’s precious to me. Will you help me preserve it?