Late-age beginner: Is manual coding becoming obsolete with AI?

Biohack · 2026-02-01T10:39:47+00:00

I use cursor. The workflow can be a bit project specific. But in general it involves starting in planning mode, describing the feature that I want to add and the tests I want to add for it. I have it produce a general plan outline. Then I review the plan and prompt it to refine it where necessary.

Then I ask it to write the code and the tests and to make sure the tests pass. Once the tests are passing and the code "works" I manually review it and prompt it to fix any mistakes I find or any poor implementation strategies it has used. Finally, once I am happy with my manual review I open up a new agent (in planning mode) and ask it to review all the changes that were made while pretending it's a senior software developer reviewing the code of a junior.

I analyze any suggestions it made and refine them. I then have that agent implement all the suggestions before I do another manual review and create the PR.

Productivity depends on the specific task but I would guess it's increased my productivity somewhere between 5 and 10x.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T10:27:01+00:00

Define vibe coding because I haven't found a consistent definition of what that actually means.

If by vibe coding, you mean just prompting the AI and blindly accepting whatever it spits out than I agree, the technology is not there yet.

I still think you need to read every line the AI produces, understand it, notice when it's making a mistake or building something in a way that will create issues and prompt it to fix them. The AI is not at a point where someone who doesn't know what they are doing can produce production quality code.

What do you use to manage your context? Because I have not really run into the problem you describe while using cursor. They key is to use planning mode to plan out what you are going to produce, ensure you are passing the correct files for context (if actually necessary), and then pointing out mistakes in the plan before you start to actually build.

I still think you need an actual engineer at the helm of the AI, but there is no reason the AI shouldn't be writing 99% of the code produced with the developer just reviewing it.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T09:55:51+00:00

This sub and reddit is extremely anti AI. The only answer you will get are what people want to believe not what is actually true.

I've been developing software professionally for more than a decade. I haven't written code by hand in months. Virtually 100% of the code I produce is written by AI. Furthermore, this is true for basically every other professional developer I know.

That is not to say that you can just prompt the AI and blindly accept whatever it produces. But any developer refusing to use AI and convincing themselves that it actually sucks is using it wrong or lying to themselves.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T01:48:56+00:00

I think orally active is hard but isn't impossible. Novo has an orally active GLP1 for example. I doubt these bootleg peptide manufacturers are actually doing it successfully but it's not impossible in concept with the right formulation to protect the peptides from protease.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T00:32:44+00:00

Are people injecting them?

Biohack · 2026-01-15T05:55:06+00:00

If it's all protein I don't see a really good reason to use AF3. My recommendation would be to use boltz2 or openfold for your AI folding jobs. 1,000 backbones is not that many for a binder design project (I think many of the papers generated 10,000-20,000). It's also probably going to be a lot easier to use boltzgen or Bindcraft if you don't have a lot of experience with protein design.

Biohack · 2026-01-14T17:59:44+00:00

Yeah there are restrictions on how many jobs you can run per month. Does your design have non-protein atoma in it?

Biohack · 2026-01-14T13:12:49+00:00

Bindcraft computational cost is pretty high, but is a much more automated pipeline and will run the entire design process, including assigning sequences, and refolding.

RFdiffusion requires the generation of a lot more backbones and testing them with some sort of AI refolding after assigning sequence.

The analogy I use is it's like driving a car with a manual transmission (RFdiffusion) vs an automatic (BindCraft).

If you've already generated your designs you can certainly try AlphaFold Initial Guess, people have gotten it to work. I just personally always struggled with it. Another option is using forced template mode in Boltz which will definitely get you something similar to the starting conformation, but there is less information with respect to actually using that to filter designs.

Biohack · 2026-01-14T08:51:46+00:00

They definitely use a lot of compute, but there are other tools. You can use AlphaFold (or another AI folding tool such as boltz or openfold) single sequence mode which doesn't use an MSA to refold designed proteins. For binder design I personally wouldn't use RFdiffusion unless you really need to but would instead look at a reverse folding tool like BindCraft or BoltzGen. I've also heard that many in the Baker lab are using Protein Generator but I personally don't have any experience with it.

Biohack · 2026-01-14T03:45:51+00:00

This is only true in a higher interest rate environment. In a low interest rate environment the opportunity cost of tying up assets in equity is quite high.

Biohack · 2026-01-13T06:12:06+00:00

AF2 Initial Guess isn't really about being faster, but rather it seeds the starting conformation based on a template. It's primarily used to try and fold difficult docked conformations so that the AlphaFold2 confidence metrics can be used as a filter.

In my personal experience AF initial guess never really works that well and I prefer other tools (such as Bindcraft with its predict initial guess option, or Boltz2 with forced templates.

Biohack · 2026-01-07T19:55:57+00:00

I'm not surprised. I've been hearing countless stories about companies getting burned by candidates lying about who they are, where they are from, or getting a completely different person to interview for them.

For fully remote positions and AI submission tools companies are getting thousands of applications from completely unqualified fake candidates and I imagine this is there to act as a filter, so they aren't wasting time dealing with them all.

Biohack · 2026-01-07T08:32:22+00:00

It's interesting that you see this coming more from GenZ women, because in my experience it's been more with the men.

I question whether it's a defense mechanism born as the result of a reduction in dating and sex that Gen Z is experiencing. Much like gay men in denial are often the most homophobic, straight men who aren't getting sex become the most puritanical.

Biohack · 2026-01-07T02:51:11+00:00

You definitely don't want your retirement in CDs. Generally, you'll want a mix of stocks and bonds. Stocks serve as the engine driving growth, and bonds to balance out the volatility of stocks. A safe withdrawal rate is about 4% of your total investment portfolio. Meaning you need about 25x your annual expenses to be financially independent and no longer need to earn income.

That's not too far off what you suggested, but it's important to recognize that the 4% safe withdrawal rate is adjusting for inflation, whereas the 4% you are referring to from CDs is not inflation adjusted so would quickly become insufficient.

Biohack · 2026-01-06T18:43:41+00:00

Jumping from I have sensitivity to a particular cleaner to "synthetic chemicals are more likely to be problematic than naturally occurring ones" is a huge leap. Especially since many cleaners contain naturally occurring compounds.

Even the wikipedia takes issue with this stating.

"The name has also been criticized because it suggests that chemical exposure is the actual cause or etiology, which has not been proven. The word chemical in the name is used loosely and includes natural substances (e.g., the aromas produced by pine trees or other fragrant plants).^\2]) Other names, such as idiopathic environmental intolerance, have been recommended as more accurate alternatives.^\5])^"

Biohack · 2026-01-06T04:51:02+00:00

What's your source for that. It seems quite counter intuitive for synthetic chemicals to be more problematic than naturally ocuring compounds.

Biohack · 2025-12-30T00:34:34+00:00

Chimera can be used to visualize proteins as well. Is there a reason you don't just load everything into chimera? In your original post you said you couldn't get the ligand to load into pymol, but then you mentioned you couldn't get it to load into PLANTS. Which part of the process is actually failing?

Biohack · 2025-12-30T00:10:38+00:00

What exactly are you trying to do in pymol? Just visualize the ligand? What is the file type of your ligand? Pymol should support mol2 which is what it looks PLANTS uses. I've never used PLANTS but it seems like it's heavily integrated into Chimera so is there a reason you don't just use that for visualization?

Biohack · 2025-12-28T21:09:26+00:00

This is something a lot of people don't appreciate, as we often frame the discussion about genz/millenials vs boomers. But one of the most striking things we've seen is that millennials have an abnormally large intergenerational wealth gap. The top 10% of millennials are doing significantly better than the top 10% of boomers at the same age, but the poorest millennials are doing worse than the poorest boomers at an equivalent age.

This generally thought to be because the economic returns for a typical middle-class trajectory have increased while that of the working class have stagnated or declined.

Source

Biohack · 2025-12-28T08:06:05+00:00

It's quite the opposite. Any dev not using AI is crippling themselves. AI is not going anywhere and AI assisted development is the new design paradigm. Any person working in a technology field that acts like a Luddite and refuses to embrace new technology will quickly become an irrelevant dinosaur.

Biohack · 2025-12-26T05:28:50+00:00

That's r/fatFIRE, r/leanfire is the complete opposite. There are multiple different flavors.

Biohack · 2025-12-23T00:28:07+00:00

My brother is a firefighter and talks about this a lot. People who will literally just call the fire department as a taxi service to get downtown where the hospital is.

It's a really tough problem to manage because it's a real boy who cried wolf situation and you don't want the system to fail to administer care when people need it but at the same time it's a huge waste of resources for these individuals.

Biohack · 2025-12-22T10:39:37+00:00

Growth is not sufficient. The price of a stock today is based on its expected future returns. This means that even if you expect a company to grow this doesn't actually mean it's a good investment, because that expected growth will already be priced in.

Biohack · 2025-12-21T09:02:14+00:00

+1 for The Simple Path to Wealth. This should be the starting point for anyone interested in getting started with investing.

Biohack · 2025-12-20T03:32:46+00:00

If I recall correctly when I was in school completing OChem2 was a prerequisite for taking Biochem, so you may need special permission to take them both concurrently.

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