Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

Ford did: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/06/30/ford-hir...

So did Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-worke...

And I'm sure many others who didn't publicize it because they have to keep this circular economy going.

Do you know of any company that banned IDEs and went back to plain text only editing?

Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly?

Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?

In my startup, I am currently in consideration for doing this exact thing. The interesting part is it's not really the AI that's causing the issue. It's the ease of my developer to make a mess, either with messy code or feature bloat.

After figuring out the exact product we need with some very quick development cycles with AI, we now have some problems that I can't keep under control because of AI. So, currently under consideration to rewrite the core functionality without AI so we can keep it simple, understandable and slower to change.

The interesting part is that AI could do this, but managing developers with AI has become very difficult to get them to slow down and build stable simple things.

I don’t think that would ever happen. AI as a tool made the life so much easier removing initial inertia.

I agree that we still haven’t figured out what’s the best way to use AI tools, but over the time it would mature and people would come up with patterns, conventions, and design principles so the quality of what is produced will be maintained or increased while keeping the productivity gains.

In what context would generating code faster not be a desired outcome?

Assuming of course everything else stays the same (quality, etc.)

I think devs themselves won't want to work for a company that doesn't let you use Codex et al.

Best use cases are along the periphery: security checks, performance checks, test generation.

i dont know

Although code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.

I was using tabnine in 2020, I used copilot autocomplete + ChatGPT, then Claude Code. All this to say, I willingly adopted each wave.

Having said that, for all our startups “interesting” code I use no AI, not even tab complete. For a few reasons:

- having derived the code and built a mental model is something like 90% of the work, the code artefact being 10%. (You can probably verify this yourself, if you’ve implemented something once and then someone deleted it all, you could rewrite it MUCH faster the second time).

- once I have this model / vision in my mind, I’m streaming it from my mind into reality via code and having code suggestions pop up breaks that flow state for me.

- using Claude code even on throwaway scripts can mask problems. Why is doing this thing so difficult that it needs an AI to write the code? And usually when I’m writing those scripts I have a thought or insight about the system. in other words it’s nice to have that low stakes time.

- models are still frustratingly bad at spatial reasoning and I don’t see this improving anytime soon, which is a problem for a lot of graphics code.

- the code models produce still isn’t what I’d consider great code; subjective of course but it’s our product and we think having great code in our core technology is well worth it in the long term!

I do still use Claude code on various commoditised pieces (account UI, etc) and I use Claude as a great search engine, though its explanations of complex topics still kind of sucks and a human blog is almost always better.

We are a small company of 15 engs.

My company hasn't switched at all... does that count?

We don’t have a no-AI policy but I’m trying to hand roll some code, because it is useful for interviews. It is very difficult to memorize the exact syntax unless I hand write code everyday.

One think I think is strange about the m programming world we live in now is the mythologization of pre llm code. As if people weren’t copying code from stack overflow, auto completing their way through APIs using intellisense, intellicode, tab nine, or checking in code there didn’t properly test or understand

My employer is encouraging AI adoption across the board, to the point of basically making tokenmaxing part of performance KPIs. I think they're pushing headlong into disaster, but they are not the kind of people to take advice, or admit mistakes.

I use AI coding tools both at work and in my hobby projects. It very clear to me they're nuclear-powered footguns, and we have a long, long way yet in developing practices, structures and workflows that will enable true benefits while minimizing the absolutely toxic baggage/fallout/side effects.

I look at the big corp push for AI adoption as another instance of boards of directors choosing the large investors / their own personal gain over the success of the corporations they govern (first instance being the "back to the office" push in attempt to shore up commercial real estate). I think the circular economy of the AI bubble has spread far and wide, and we're watching a lot of invested players trying to keep it going.

Not for code, but my wife is a doctor and has gone from using AI scribes back to manually typing out notes and has multiple friends who've done the same. Turns out the gains were eroded by having to check the work and turn verbose prose into an actual note.

Do you know any company that went back from local AI to centralized AI?

I'm running a startup and we deliberately don't use AI for development. We only use it for review.

We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed.

Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer

I guess also useful to answer your question, is look at the companies who had a successful track record, of delivering reliable, consistent software over 5 to 10 years, went full vibe coding and got into a massive end crash.

You have evidence video here, that the AWS AI Division (04:23) went literally full vibe coding:

"I was laid off from my AI software engineering job at Amazon" - https://youtu.be/ZAom6f4-vh0?t=263

The whole division has been dismantled...

Stepping back from AI completely (vs changing how AI is used in the company) is like stopping using IDEs, compilers etc. It's a tool.

I don't understand why people would even entertain that. They are completely fine using random libraries written by random people but not having AI helping with a small refactoring? Nobody is making you use AI to do the entire work.

I see developers using languages with garbage collectors and projects based on heavyweight frameworks while saying "we can't use AI because we still need to understand the code" or "I love coding and AI doesn't allow me to do what I love"

If you are one these people... Dude, you aren't doing the work yourself already. Back in the day memory management was one of the hardest pieces of the programming work. A lot of time went also to building stable and bug free string libraries, math libraries, UI toolkits etc. Without shifting complexity (and tedious work) elsewhere, we wouldn't have been able to build the software ecosystem we have today