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There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabi

There used to be a time when you needed to be very skilled woodworker in order to make nice cabinets. There still are, but the number of machine / CNC made cabinets outnumber artisanal 100% hand-made cabinets by some incredible number. For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there... And that's how I believe software engineering will end up. Hand crafted code will still be a thing, written by very skilled developers...but it will be a small niche market, where there's little (to no) economic incentives to keep doing it the craftmanship way. It is a brave new world. We really don't know if future talent will learn the craft like old talent did.

therein 1y ago
It is an analogy that only passes the initial glance. Especially since the CNC made cabinets are not full of design flaws. Your analogy would only make sense if these CNC cabinets were generated by CNC AI that may or may not follow the sensibilities of a human designer. Or if the inexperienced carpenters using CNC machines just described the design verbally to the CNC machine instead of carefully encoding their design into gcode. Clearly you don't value the process of coding if you think it is analogous to a carpenter manually carving the details of a design that's above the process of building it. It is not a good analogy, at all.
- logicprog 1y ago
  There's plenty of cheap furniture that was designed only in CAD or something that is flimsy, doesn't fit human proportions well, and looks ugly in real life, because it was quicker to just throw it together on the computer, CNC it out, and mail the parts to people for them to build themselves than to actually carefully test it and work out the kinks. That's basically what half of IKEA is. So I think this is a decent analogy.
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  Surely you can see the point though - that there are numerous of trades that previously involved mastery of tools, a process of designing custom products for customers, and were made to last for decades, centuries even. But many of those have long since been automated away, because customers are more than happy to purchase cheaper products, made almost entirely by machines. "AI-free" development will be a tiny niche in the coming years and decades. And those developers will not get paid any extra for doing it the old way. Just like artisanal workers today.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    What’s the saying, software projects are never finished, only abandoned. Cabinets are finished.
Cheer2171 1y ago
People do love Ikea, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and The Gap.
rafterydj 1y ago
Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "No Silver Bullet" because I hear this argument a lot and I'm not sure it holds. There _are_ niches in software that are artisanal craft, that have been majorly replaced (like custom website designers and stock WordPress templates), but the vast majority of the industry relies on cases where turning software into templates isn't possible, or isn't as efficient, or conflicts with business logic.
- hellisothers 1y ago
  Counterpoint: I forget where I originally read this thought but consider compilers. At one point coding was writing assembly and now it’s generally not, sometimes some people still do it but it is far from the norm. Now, usually, you “write code” in an abstraction (possibly of an abstraction) and magic takes care of the rest. While I imagine “make an app that does X” won’t be as useful as “if … else” there is a middle ground where you’re relinquishing much of the control you currently are trying to retain.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    As complexity in a program increases, getting to the level of detail of defining the if...else becomes important. Using plain English to define the business logic, and allowing AI to fill in the gaps, will likely lead to a lot of logic errors that go uncaught until there is a big problem. For the AI to avoid this, I'd imagine it would need to be directed not to assume anything, and instead ask for clarification on each and every thing, until there is no more ambiguity about what is required. This would be a very long and tedious back and forth, where someone will want to delegate the task to someone else, and at that point, the person might as well write their own logic in certain areas. I've found myself effectively giving sudocode to the LLM to try to properly explain the logic that is needed.
  - 1y ago
adidoit 1y ago
I understand the analogy, but code is so much more fungible. It is the stuff of thought. Rather than a physical thing with hard limits. I think software will remain much more artisan because, in some sense, software is a more crystallized form of thinking, yet still incredibly fungible and nebulous.
jrflowers 1y ago
> For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there Minimalist design isn’t the result of minimal effort. It actually takes quite a lot of time and skill to design a cabinet that can flat pack AND be assembled easily AND fit cost constraints AND fit manufacturing and shipping and storage constraints AND have mass market appeal. IKEA stuff exists because of hundreds or thousands of people with expertise in their roles, not in spite of them.
benreesman 1y ago
Anything adversarial is going to be the best people using the best assist: military drones, trading, anything performance hot pathed (AI inference itself), thats all too competitive to be anything but hybrid. But by a similar argument, most anything with healthy competition and a discerning market can only lag that standard by some amount. It's easy to conflate a once-in-a-generation orgy of monopolistic consolidation with the emergence of useful coding LLMs, but monopolies always get flabby and slack, and eventually the host organism evicts the parasite. It's when, not if. And we'll still have the neat tools.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
talideon 1y ago
Those CNC-made cabinets are driven by software written by a human being. And I'm not talking about the CNC software itself: CNC machine operators _code_, even if it's not obvious to those who don't know somebody who works with CNC machines. They provide descriptions to the machine in the form of M-Code and G-Code. Your analogy doesn't work at all. (I know this because my previous landlady's husband was a CNC machine operator.)
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  C'mon, this is not hard. What takes more time to master: Learning how to be a competent woodworker, so that you can build a piece of complex furniture from scratch, by hand. Or learning how to punch in instructions, following templates. The first can take years to master, the latter is done in mere months. You don't need to be a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine. With LLMs, we're now at the point where non-programmers can get working CRUD apps. Nearly impossible only 2 years ago. LLMs are encroaching what is the bread and butter to thousands of webdevs out in the world. You can still be a rock star dev that writes world class code, but you better be working for employers that value it - because AI will force prices down. When customers discover that a $20 subscription, or service can create them things that would previously cost thousands of dollars in dev money, there's no way back. Once that cat is out of the bag, you won't get it back in.
  - talideon 1y ago
    Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to say, but it's in no way analogous. Your analogy is bogus. And sure, you don't need a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine, but the that person is still highly skilled, it's just that the set of skills is different: they need to be able to program on some level, and they also need to have an understanding of the materials they're working with. Go away for a bit and so some research on what somebody who operates a CNC machine actually does.
4rt 1y ago
i used to make 'leaflet websites' in the 90s, then shopping carts. it was an era where everybody wanted an online presence to make themselves seem legitimiate. i expect this is the normal progression of anybody born in the 80s who could do software dev. it got to a point where people would say they needed a website and i'd say to them that a facebook page would meet their needs better or eventually that a shopify site met their needs better. my business obviously folded.

therein 1y ago

It is an analogy that only passes the initial glance. Especially since the CNC made cabinets are not full of design flaws. Your analogy would only make sense if these CNC cabinets were generated by CNC AI that may or may not follow the sensibilities of a human designer. Or if the inexperienced carpenters using CNC machines just described the design verbally to the CNC machine instead of carefully encoding their design into gcode. Clearly you don't value the process of coding if you think it is analogous to a carpenter manually carving the details of a design that's above the process of building it. It is not a good analogy, at all.

logicprog 1y ago
There's plenty of cheap furniture that was designed only in CAD or something that is flimsy, doesn't fit human proportions well, and looks ugly in real life, because it was quicker to just throw it together on the computer, CNC it out, and mail the parts to people for them to build themselves than to actually carefully test it and work out the kinks. That's basically what half of IKEA is. So I think this is a decent analogy.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Surely you can see the point though - that there are numerous of trades that previously involved mastery of tools, a process of designing custom products for customers, and were made to last for decades, centuries even. But many of those have long since been automated away, because customers are more than happy to purchase cheaper products, made almost entirely by machines. "AI-free" development will be a tiny niche in the coming years and decades. And those developers will not get paid any extra for doing it the old way. Just like artisanal workers today.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  What’s the saying, software projects are never finished, only abandoned. Cabinets are finished.

Cheer2171 1y ago

People do love Ikea, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and The Gap.

rafterydj 1y ago

Counterpoint: a cabinet has always been a cabinet and nobody expects it to be anything but a cabinet. Rarely are software projects as repeatable and alike to each other as cabinets are. Software is codified rules and complexity, which is entirely aribtrary, and builds off of itself in an infinite number of ways. That makes it much more difficult to turn into factory output cabinetry. I think more people should read "No Silver Bullet" because I hear this argument a lot and I'm not sure it holds. There _are_ niches in software that are artisanal craft, that have been majorly replaced (like custom website designers and stock WordPress templates), but the vast majority of the industry relies on cases where turning software into templates isn't possible, or isn't as efficient, or conflicts with business logic.

hellisothers 1y ago
Counterpoint: I forget where I originally read this thought but consider compilers. At one point coding was writing assembly and now it’s generally not, sometimes some people still do it but it is far from the norm. Now, usually, you “write code” in an abstraction (possibly of an abstraction) and magic takes care of the rest. While I imagine “make an app that does X” won’t be as useful as “if … else” there is a middle ground where you’re relinquishing much of the control you currently are trying to retain.
- al_borland 1y ago
  As complexity in a program increases, getting to the level of detail of defining the if...else becomes important. Using plain English to define the business logic, and allowing AI to fill in the gaps, will likely lead to a lot of logic errors that go uncaught until there is a big problem. For the AI to avoid this, I'd imagine it would need to be directed not to assume anything, and instead ask for clarification on each and every thing, until there is no more ambiguity about what is required. This would be a very long and tedious back and forth, where someone will want to delegate the task to someone else, and at that point, the person might as well write their own logic in certain areas. I've found myself effectively giving sudocode to the LLM to try to properly explain the logic that is needed.
- 1y ago

adidoit 1y ago

I understand the analogy, but code is so much more fungible. It is the stuff of thought. Rather than a physical thing with hard limits. I think software will remain much more artisan because, in some sense, software is a more crystallized form of thinking, yet still incredibly fungible and nebulous.

jrflowers 1y ago

> For every masterpiece made by a Japanese cabinet maker, imagine how many Ikea cabinets there are out there Minimalist design isn’t the result of minimal effort. It actually takes quite a lot of time and skill to design a cabinet that can flat pack AND be assembled easily AND fit cost constraints AND fit manufacturing and shipping and storage constraints AND have mass market appeal. IKEA stuff exists because of hundreds or thousands of people with expertise in their roles, not in spite of them.

benreesman 1y ago

Anything adversarial is going to be the best people using the best assist: military drones, trading, anything performance hot pathed (AI inference itself), thats all too competitive to be anything but hybrid. But by a similar argument, most anything with healthy competition and a discerning market can only lag that standard by some amount. It's easy to conflate a once-in-a-generation orgy of monopolistic consolidation with the emergence of useful coding LLMs, but monopolies always get flabby and slack, and eventually the host organism evicts the parasite. It's when, not if. And we'll still have the neat tools.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

talideon 1y ago

Those CNC-made cabinets are driven by software written by a human being. And I'm not talking about the CNC software itself: CNC machine operators _code_, even if it's not obvious to those who don't know somebody who works with CNC machines. They provide descriptions to the machine in the form of M-Code and G-Code. Your analogy doesn't work at all. (I know this because my previous landlady's husband was a CNC machine operator.)

TrackerFF 1y ago
C'mon, this is not hard. What takes more time to master: Learning how to be a competent woodworker, so that you can build a piece of complex furniture from scratch, by hand. Or learning how to punch in instructions, following templates. The first can take years to master, the latter is done in mere months. You don't need to be a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine. With LLMs, we're now at the point where non-programmers can get working CRUD apps. Nearly impossible only 2 years ago. LLMs are encroaching what is the bread and butter to thousands of webdevs out in the world. You can still be a rock star dev that writes world class code, but you better be working for employers that value it - because AI will force prices down. When customers discover that a $20 subscription, or service can create them things that would previously cost thousands of dollars in dev money, there's no way back. Once that cat is out of the bag, you won't get it back in.
- talideon 1y ago
  Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to say, but it's in no way analogous. Your analogy is bogus. And sure, you don't need a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine, but the that person is still highly skilled, it's just that the set of skills is different: they need to be able to program on some level, and they also need to have an understanding of the materials they're working with. Go away for a bit and so some research on what somebody who operates a CNC machine actually does.

4rt 1y ago

i used to make 'leaflet websites' in the 90s, then shopping carts. it was an era where everybody wanted an online presence to make themselves seem legitimiate. i expect this is the normal progression of anybody born in the 80s who could do software dev. it got to a point where people would say they needed a website and i'd say to them that a facebook page would meet their needs better or eventually that a shopify site met their needs better. my business obviously folded.