Weekend Getaways: The Case for Going Back to Manual Coding
Let’s be honest: in the last couple of years, using AI to ship software hasn’t just become a nifty trick—it’s become the default baseline.
We live in a world of high velocity. Got a feature to build? Toss the prompt to an LLM. Need to integrate an unfamiliar API? Don’t bother digging through the documentation or scouring GitHub issues; just ask the AI to synthesize a custom wrapper, copy-paste the snippet, check the summary, and move on.
I’m not anti-AI. In fact, I completely support it. When you’re dealing with high-stakes projects, tight deadlines, and complex enterprise requirements, why spend hours reading dry docs, experimenting with broken code blocks, and manually handling boilerplate when an AI can condense that entire cycle into minutes? Speed matters. Iteration speed wins markets. For deadline-heavy tasks, AI is an absolute superpower.
But this relentless pursuit of efficiency comes with a silent cost: it takes away the pure, unadulterated joy of building things from scratch.
The Velocity Trap
When every coding session is streamlined by an automated assistant, the act of programming shifts from creation to curation. You become a prompt engineer and a code reviewer rather than an architect and a craftsman. Something that this blog had emphasized on really well
Remember the wonder of your very first “Hello World”? Or that incredibly basic, visually questionable weather app you built years ago that—against all odds—actually worked when you plugged in a city name?
That feeling didn’t come from a fast deployment cycle. It came from the friction. It came from the struggle of understanding a concept, wrestling with a syntax error for two hours, and finally experiencing the breakthrough on your own.
When AI abstracts the friction, it also abstracts the dopamine hit of a hard-earned victory and the ton of learning that comes with it.
The “Weekend Getaway” Philosophy
As programmers, we should unplug from the productivity metrics every once in a while and go back to manual coding—not for the rush of a deadline, but for the sheer fun and joy of the project. As a weekend getaway.
When the stakes are low and the timeline is open, why not choose the scenic route?
- Read the Raw Docs: Open up the actual documentation. Read the introductory guides, explore the edge-case properties, and understand why the library was designed the way it was.
- Implement from Scratch: Instead of pulling in a massive npm package or asking an LLM to generate an entire utility class, write it out line by line. Build that basic state manager, map out that custom gesture logic, or write your own light database wrapper.
- Embrace the Errors: When your console lights up red, don’t feed it back to a chat box. Trace the stack overflow, log the variables, and debug it the old-school way.
After all, it’s just for funanyways! Even if its crappy, ill-formatted, no docs, and incomplete, even a small 200 LOC file on a weekend that works fairly, even if only on the terminal, or without any interface at all, even if it just works in a specific scenario, it would be worth it! Not everything have to be production ready from day one right?
Coding as Relaxation and Practice
Going completely “zero AI” on a side project acts as a fantastic form of active relaxation. It removes the performance anxiety of having to finish and re-centers your relationship with code around exploration.
It’s also the ultimate sandbox for deliberate practice. When you aren’t relying on an autocomplete engine to predict your next architectural layout, your brain is forced to flex its foundational muscles. You stay sharp, you retain deep technical concepts, and you remind yourself why you fell in love with software engineering in the first place.
So, for your next weekend project, leave the AI assistants turned off. Pick a weird API, build a useless but beautiful tool, tinker directly with raw events, and just enjoy the craft.
Optimize your workweek for speed. But save your weekends for the joy of building.