Coding by hand is becoming obsolete - Andrew Ng. I disagree.
Published: November 5, 2025
It already is. Andrew is just being polite.
After 25 years of writing code line by line, I now execute everything with AI Coders. Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI are my day-to-day tools.
AI does the coding, but I still review, explain, and learn from it. The buck stops with me.
The speed of execution is huge. But that's just one part of it.
It's about what can now be done. My pre-AI world was limited to SAS, Python, Excel, SQL and ML models. Projects I once declined because of technical limits I now take on and deliver confidently. My analytics portal (www.tigzig.com) with 30+ micro apps was built this way, in parallel with client projects. It's still a stretch - error logs, debugging, validation. Faster, yes. Easier, yes. The grind doesn't go away. But, what I deliver now is on a different scale.
The core skill today isn't syntax.
It's domain understanding and working with AI - how you convey intent, plan the project, review output, and validate results. And - the more you understand architecture, the greater your edge.
Coding by hand is ancient history. That time has gone. This is the era of AI Coders.
Skip the hesitation
- Stop coding by hand.
- New to code? Use ChatGPT or Google AI Studio. Try VBA or Python in Excel (xlwings Lite).
- For notebooks: use an embedded coder such as Mito-AI (part of my stack). Jupyter-AI (yet to try)
- For scripts and apps: start with VS Code + Gemini CLI (free). Move to Cursor or Claude Code as needed.
Remember: share what you know, ask what you don't, tell it what you want, iterate, validate.
Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code, Gemini CLI - these are now necessary tools for analysts and data scientists alongside Excel, Jupyter, and Colab.
Resources
- For a quick start: youtube.com/@VoloBuilds on YouTube - practical tutorials from an experienced developer. Simple to complex builds across major tools.
- For more guides, closer to your use cases: YouTube - just search and pick the first few.
- For analytics-specific resources and guides: tigzig.com
- For live analytics apps (open source) Database AI, Quants, GPTs and Automations: www.tigzig.com
