Often when you're calling something "manual" you're taking something off the automated happy path to tediously and slowly wind the thing through its complex process by hand. The difference between manual coding and human coding is tedium and laboriousness. It's not laborious to program, but the phrase "manual coding" evokes that image.
Maybe that’s what they’ve been doing? No one using Vim, Emacs, or Unix as an IDE would say they do manual coding with the amount of automation that usually goes there.
