We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organize and modify them. It’s a bit indecent for a developer to complain that LLMs took away the pleasure of molding a clay made of bits, while the robots we enabled to build took the actual clay off of potmakers actual hands.
And what the author forgets to mention is that we got it good. Oh boy. As a software developer, I can work in any field I want. I started on video compression. I moved to finance. I make games in my spare time. I make plugins for music. And I get to be paid way more than my neighbor who’s a heart surgeon. I can work remotely 100%. I can go to a nice beach in Thailand, work 2 hours in the morning and enjoy the rest of the day, and still make more than the median salary in France, where I live.
The grief is not the loss of the craft alone, it’s the loss of that craft that paid for your house.
As they said: software is eating the world. Well, it is now eating itself. It’s only fair.
The author is right though, human societies need to ask themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice all the crafts on the altar of productivity and convenience.
The Amish decided they didn’t want to. It’s a bit of a weird choice, but it is a choice.
I think this is a bit facetious. Although software had a bunch of localized impacts, it killed only a handful of mainstream professions. People still had to typeset articles, there was just less lead involved. For a writer, switching from a typewriter to a keyboard didn't mean you somehow needed less skill to write.
That said, I'm with you that it's tacky for software engineers to complain about their own hardships. We are some of the wealthiest and most pampered white collar workers out there, and we're not exactly innocent bystanders.
I wrote a comment on this thread. After reading yours I upvoted it and deleted mine: you clearly gave it more thought than I did and expressed my sentiment a lot clearer.
The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it.
Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.
Would you say mechanics, repairmen, and other trade workers are more valuable today? They have become rarer yes, and everyone thinks they must be making bank off their rarer skill set, and yet the actual wages those skilled people receive haven't gone up.
Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill.
How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments.
When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it.
Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version.
Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.
To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photographers were commissioned to take photos for special events, etc.
These days, everybody is an expert photographer, taking thousands of irrelevant photos with their smartphones. The volume of photos has exploded, the quality of the best has minimally changed (i.e. before being photoshopped, etc.)
The current crop of AI-aided tools are comparable to the early digital cameras in phones.
I've been feeling the craft side of this for the last few years. My education is in Fine Art and I am a self taught UI developer. To me this was a craft of making the code do what the designer envisioned and working with creatives to create engaging and unique interfaces. Slowly but surely "standardization" eroded this via bootstrap and material UI and interfaces lost that spark of creativity. This was the beginning of thinking of sites as products in my mind. LLMs are just the nail in this coffin. Since tools like Claude Code and Cursor have entered the market, I don't do tech in my free time anymore. I don't enjoy it now. I just use the LLM at work like the business dictates (and monitors) then clock out promptly at 5:00.
I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.
It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.
I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.
There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.
One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
I don’t think this split is fundamental or permanent.
Look at photography.
You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.
And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.
That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.
Using an LLM for coding is like using a Electric shaver. It is unpredictable and you have to keep going over the same area in hopes that it will pick up the remaining few stubs of hair. Boring, irritating but very convenient.
Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
i think anyone who feels dispossessed from the advance of technology should rekindle that spirit of hands-on adventure by looking at clay pots at the museum.
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
I think the craft isn't gone, it's shifting. I use three different AI coding assistants depending on the task, and the skill is knowing what to ask for, how to review what comes back, and maintaining coherence across a codebase that multiple models have touched. The craft is now in system design, specification, and verification — not in typing the code yourself.
I think this article misses a potential connection in the capitalist critique of LLMs to correlate this to the equivalent "industrialization" of coding. When a craft becomes industrialized, as is talked about here, you see the divergence in hobbyists and mass production.
I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programmers landing jobs and being able to output professional code by crafting it thoughtfully as there wasn't a major output difference previously. Now we are seeing that difference.
> Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
I do not agree with this assertion and I don't know why I don't see more pushback against it, neither here nor in the comments for the original post.
If you're a "craft-lover" sitting next to and working with a "make-it-go person", odds are you will be very much aware of it. Even non-technical leadership is likely to be able to notice it if they're perceptive enough.
The author conflates two paradigms:
The first is one of a child learning BASIC not for beauty but for making things happen on the screen.
The second is an adult producing software not because he enjoys the act, challenge and workflow, but for shipping software.
I don’t see any difference between the child learning BASIC for its beauty and the chase to make things happen on the screen. Secondly, there is a very profound difference between a child creating and an adult creating for profit. The profit motive changes everything, even for someone “doing it for the love of it.”
There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps.
I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if a = 1 after setting a to 1.
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address:
- Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI.
- The IP theft that powers the models.
- The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low.
- The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI.
- The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding algorithms and creating beauty.
These articles lie by omission, direct your attention to the points they want you to discuss, present false dichotomies and are generally deceptive. If these people win, we are in for a horrible future.
I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.
124 comments
We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organize and modify them. It’s a bit indecent for a developer to complain that LLMs took away the pleasure of molding a clay made of bits, while the robots we enabled to build took the actual clay off of potmakers actual hands.
And what the author forgets to mention is that we got it good. Oh boy. As a software developer, I can work in any field I want. I started on video compression. I moved to finance. I make games in my spare time. I make plugins for music. And I get to be paid way more than my neighbor who’s a heart surgeon. I can work remotely 100%. I can go to a nice beach in Thailand, work 2 hours in the morning and enjoy the rest of the day, and still make more than the median salary in France, where I live.
The grief is not the loss of the craft alone, it’s the loss of that craft that paid for your house.
As they said: software is eating the world. Well, it is now eating itself. It’s only fair.
The author is right though, human societies need to ask themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice all the crafts on the altar of productivity and convenience.
The Amish decided they didn’t want to. It’s a bit of a weird choice, but it is a choice.
That said, I'm with you that it's tacky for software engineers to complain about their own hardships. We are some of the wealthiest and most pampered white collar workers out there, and we're not exactly innocent bystanders.
Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.
Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill.
How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments.
When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it.
These days, everybody is an expert photographer, taking thousands of irrelevant photos with their smartphones. The volume of photos has exploded, the quality of the best has minimally changed (i.e. before being photoshopped, etc.)
The current crop of AI-aided tools are comparable to the early digital cameras in phones.
It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.
I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.
Look at photography.
You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.
And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.
That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.
Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programmers landing jobs and being able to output professional code by crafting it thoughtfully as there wasn't a major output difference previously. Now we are seeing that difference.
Food for thought, interesting article!
> Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
I do not agree with this assertion and I don't know why I don't see more pushback against it, neither here nor in the comments for the original post.
If you're a "craft-lover" sitting next to and working with a "make-it-go person", odds are you will be very much aware of it. Even non-technical leadership is likely to be able to notice it if they're perceptive enough.
I don’t see any difference between the child learning BASIC for its beauty and the chase to make things happen on the screen. Secondly, there is a very profound difference between a child creating and an adult creating for profit. The profit motive changes everything, even for someone “doing it for the love of it.”
a = 1after setting a to 1.Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
- Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI.
- The IP theft that powers the models.
- The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low.
- The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI.
- The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding algorithms and creating beauty.
These articles lie by omission, direct your attention to the points they want you to discuss, present false dichotomies and are generally deceptive. If these people win, we are in for a horrible future.
>The market is penalizing them for it.
I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.