Developer says they'll spend three months “coding by hand” at Brooklyn retreat as AI roils the craft

Miguel Conner, a developer and AI agent builder, has announced a three‑month experiment to write code largely without AI assistance at the Recurse Center in Brooklyn. It has been reported that Conner moved to New York for the retreat and is roughly six weeks into the self‑directed stint — a deliberate pause to relearn the fundamentals at a moment when many in tech insist programming is a solved problem. Why step away when AI can churn out working code in seconds? For Conner, that friction is the point.

From building agents to bench pressing basics

Conner is no Luddite. He spent the past two years at Aily Labs in Barcelona, where it has been reported that he helped build AI agents and early internal tools — including a web search agent he says predated some high‑profile public releases. He also ran a journal club on LLM papers, digging into models like DeepSeek R1, Olmo 3 and Llama 3. In short: he knows the power of these tools and what they can do for shipping software fast.

The tradeoff: speed versus muscle memory

His argument is simple and familiar: AI speeds iteration and can be an excellent tutor, but it can also obscure the learning that comes from wrestling with a codebase. Conner borrows Cal Newport’s exercise analogy — the strain of crafting code is the craft — and says he’s felt a growing list of concepts he’d left on the back burner while shipping agent‑powered features. Put another way: sometimes you have to put down the power tool and relearn how to whittle.

A small experiment with big implications

Recurse Center is a fitting stage for the experiment — a place built for focused, self‑directed practice after applicants pass a coding interview. It has been reported that Conner chose this moment to catch up on fundamentals and regain leverage over tools he helped create. Whether this is a quaint detour or a model other engineers will follow remains to be seen, but the tension he highlights — between convenience and craft — is already one of the industry’s most human debates.

Sources: miguelconner.substack.com, Hacker News