Coding by hand is becoming obsolete - Andrew Ng. I disagree.

It already is. Andrew is just being polite.

(Post link below)

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's 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 (app.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.

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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.

- Andrew Ng’s post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewyng_ai-coding-just-arrived-in-jupyter-notebooks-activity-7391182314397032448-G1gB

- For analytics-specific resources and guides: tigzig.com

- For live analytics apps (open source) Database AI, Quants, GPTs and Automations: app.tigzig.com