Dev urges junior coders to ditch handwriting code, like pencil skills after speech input
brandon_galang · x · 2026-10-02
Developer Brandon Galang sparked debate on whether junior developers should still learn to hand-write code. His take: ruthlessly cut it out and learn to drive at the highest abstraction level you can manage while still validating your work — the equivalent of practicing handwriting after you could speak and words appeared on paper.
He clarifies he isn't saying don't reason about code, only that handwriting seems a poor investment now. His observations:
- Struggling "vibe coders" aren't really reasoning: they one-shot everything without understanding what the code needs to do or which failure modes to avoid;
- Meanwhile engineers at companies like Cursor ship 2000 PRs a week, undercutting complaints that agents "can't write good code."
His challenge: can you out-code Fable 6 or Opus 5.5 — and even if you can, is it net beneficial given where this is heading?
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