I went on a skiing holiday over the Christmas break. We were flying into Salzburg airport and the scenery was incredible, the cloud was super low and you could see the Alps stretching out under a winter sunset across the Horizon.

The cabin crew came over the tannoy and said

Can you all please turn all electronic devices completely off before landing. This includes mobile phones. All items must be SWITCHED OFF, not just on flight mode. We’re going to do an automatic landing.

This was super interesting to me, I’d never heard of this requirement before. It turns out that the low cloud meant that we were doing something called a Category III Approach where the cloud was so low the pilots would essentially be flying on instruments until they got to the ground. In these conditions it was easier and safer to do an auto-landing. The airline policy was that non-approved PEDs (your phone) must be “hard off” for auto landing approaches. Presumably to stop any interference with the radar and whatnot.

This gave rise to a second, more interesting question.

If this was a requirement for all auto landings, and I’d never heard it before, was this my first auto-landing? If so, why did we not just auto land all the time?

Again, a little bit of Googling (well, Kagi’ing) told me that Pilots need to practise their flying technique. If they would always fly autopilot, they would lose the skills to fly.. On the face of it, it makes total sense.

But the idea stuck with me all week. You’d have to be living under a rock to not see the change in software development in the last year. Agentic coding is everywhere. I personally use it every day. We’re officially at the point where I can get claude to one-shot small to medium features straight from the ticket. I’ve seen several posts recently from respectable software engineers saying last month was the first month they didn’t open up an IDE, and I can believe it.

And yet, I still find myself handwriting code, but not really knowing why. I totally get that my job is to deliver value and code is just a tool. But I think my job is to deliver value in all possible conditions, just like pilots have to land the plane in the fog.

If I delegate all the doing to the machine, no matter how repetitive it is, I lose the muscle memory that comes with mastering the craft. That in turn means I can only provide value when my internet connection is good and Anthropics servers are working. I can’t land my plane in the fog.

So I don’t think the question is ‘can LLM’s ever catch up’ anymore, they already have in a lot of cases. But regardless of the level of automation available I’ll still keep handwriting code some of the time, to keep the muscle memory.