Code is a dying craft.

How to Write Code by Hand.

I find it extremely interesting of the differing opinions of the parasocial (inlcuding myself) pertaining to how well-equipped we may or may not be for AI's self governance and rapid increase in its capabilities. There's a real divergence - everyday I find it more difficult to believe that the AI space IS a bubble, because I've seen it firsthand, along with some creators I respect saying it so. The bubble. is. not. popping.

And so it seems that writing code by hand is becoming more and more of a tool of pasttime that we admire from a distance. We shall be watching documentaries and fictional adaptations 100 years from now about the brilliant invention of writing code by hand and compiling it yourself on a given machine. Like Alan Turing's machine, or writing assembly, or goddamn like a fucking pen to paper.

I am not by any means entitled to complain about the dying artform, nor necessarily am I. Nor am I pointing out anything new, profound, or groundbreaking. I simply write in the way I so please, in the same way I live in the way I move my body and eat good food every day. To be strong is to be free, and I find my existence to be more meaningful than any innovation I have invented or ever will invent in attempt to build some kind of legacy-imprint that would be my rememberance. To think I could move the flow of the world. How utterly presumptious of me.

The Curse of Quickness

Anyways, like I said - I'm not necessarily complaining. But there is, to an extent, by which I am worried about the pace at which we advance technologically. But by gad I am not one of those "AI will kill us" believers, nor did I ever believe in that obvious plant of that Anthropic researcher who quit and unleashed bloat-slop posts on Twitter about AI killing us by the end of this decade. BUT, there is a real curse on quickness, and I question, for the sake of retaining my critical thinking skills, what it might mean to slow down.

Appreciating a Dying Craft

Hence, a new startup idea! It's writing code by hand. Yes, that's right - what if we marketed a new product entirely around the idea that no AI was used at any step of implementation and GTM. That it's what one would call a "pure" product, that we could prove to users that every word was typed manually into a text editor and compiled by my own user-driven command shell.

A user could confidently use a product knowing there's no AI involvement. The product itself doesn't matter, it's relevant. It's not important. More than anything, could we frame this in the sense of purity, where AI is this mark-of-the-beast sort of omen. "Our product is like a fresh stream in a barren wasteland." Haha. I would market the shit out of that if I could.

But if there were any upside, maybe the fact that no code that runs this new business model--no new upkeep, anything--could feed AI models. This would be tantamount to being an off-the-grid entity (there's very strong irony here, please catch this). It'd be like Kevin Flynn's house off the grid in Tron: Legacy in 2014. What a fucking film, huh?

VC Mottos: "I Am Speed"

The primary bottleneck constraint goes without saying - how could a hand-written startup keep pace with the ever-changing companies that use their 200 Codex 20x Pro plans to push out incommensurable changes in 5 frickin minutes? Especially after experiencing startup culture for myself, I agree that basically coding with a pencil and an eraser would not keep up with ai b2b saas.

But does it have to? Would venture capital firms and PE gain the capacity to appreciate something not because of how quickly it can be built, but rather what it stands for? Kidding, they can only see their profit margins. But even then, they might get a real kicking out of this. I think that hand-written code has the potential to--if it hasn't already--enter a new realm of appreciation, similarly to hand embroidery, quilting, blacksmithing, cobbling, etc etc. I'm aware we're in much too early of an era, but isn't the notion of this still hilarious?

Standing Examples

I've talked to others about how writing by hand becomes a new idea of appreciating the craftsmanship in something, and how this becomes a selling point on its own. Video game development is a really good example. It's kind of an industry that was nichely slow at adapting AI usage into its core development loop, but once it did, it has taken off. Have you taken a look at the current state of Roblox? Yeesh.

While I genuinely think AI may no longer be a bubble, it's interesting to see how we might see a dynamic shift in how the whole act of building software might get interpreted in the near future. In the same way that AI evolves quick, movements in the opposite direction will offset it just as fast.

Thanks for reading! I'm going to go build another clock to-do calculator AI b2b saas app now!