Hand-Coding Backlash Signals Loss of Agency

A DEV.to analysis argues that recent calls to “go back to writing code by hand” are not nostalgic reactionism but a signal that AI-assisted workflows can erode engineers’ agency. The piece links three signals: a popular personal post about returning to hand-coding, an arXiv paper (“LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate”) that finds delegated LLM workflows introduce systematic, hard-to-detect errors, and a New York Times report that mandatory AI adoption at Meta has harmed employee morale. The author defines agency as the ability to understand, trace, and safely ship code, and recommends practical team practices—restricting agent changes to familiar code, separating generation from review, maintaining manual-critical code, scrutinizing agent output, and tracking rework instead of raw output. The piece frames the backlash as a call to preserve learning and quality, not a rejection of AI tools.