21 ms·

Grief and the AI split

• simonw 7mo ago
  This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the 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. Helps explain why some people are delighted to have AI write code for them while others are unhappy that the part they enjoyed so much has been greatly reduced. Similar note from Kellan (a clear member of the make-it-go group) in https://laughingmeme.org/2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-the-easy-part.html https://laughingmeme.org/2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-the... : > That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.
  • rudedogg 7mo ago
    I think the real divide is over quality and standards. We all have different thresholds for what is acceptable, and our roles as engineers typically reflect that preference. I can grind on a single piece of code for hours, iterating over and over until I like the way it works, the parameter names, etc. Other people do not see the value in that whatsoever, and something that works is good enough. We both are valuable in different ways. Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed a lot. There’s also some effort requires in honing your skill using them. The “default” output is average quality, but with some coaxing higher quality output is easily attained. I’m happy people are skeptical though, there are a lot of things that do require deep thought, connecting ideas in new ways, etc., and LLMs aren’t good at that in my experience.
    • enraged_camel 7mo ago
      I think this is a false dichotomy because which approach is acceptable depends heavily on context, and good engineers recognize this and are capable of adapting. Sometimes you need something to be extremely robust and fool-proof, and iterating for hours/days/weeks and even months might make sense. Things that are related to security or money are good examples. Other times, it's much more preferable to put something in front of users that works so that they start getting value from it quickly and provide feedback that can inform the iterative improvements. And sometimes you don't need to iterate at all. Good enough is good enough. Ship it and forget about it. I don't buy that AI users favor any particular approach. You can use AI to ship fast, or you can use it to test, critique, refactor and optimize your code to hell and back until it meets the required quality and standards.
      • kaffekaka 7mo ago
        Yes, it is a false dichotomy but describes a useful spectrum. People fall on different parts of the spectrum and it varies between situations and over time as well. It can remind one that it is normal to feel different from other people and different from what one felt yesterday.
    • allenu 7mo ago
      > I think the real divide is over quality and standards. I think there are multiple dimensions that people fall on regarding the issue and it's leading to a divide based on where everyone falls on those dimensions. Quality and standards are probably in there but I think risk-tolerance/aversion could be behind some how you look at quality and standards. If you're high on risk-taking, you might be more likely to forego verifying all LLM-generated code, whereas if you're very risk-averse, you're going to want to go over every line of code to make sure it works just right for fear of anything blowing up. Desire for control is probably related, too. If you desire more control in how something is achieved, you probably aren't going to like a machine doing a lot of the thinking for you.
      • bandrami 7mo ago
        This. My aversion to LLMs is much more that I have low risk tolerance and the tails of the distribution are not well-known at this point. I'm more than happy to let others step on the land mines for me and see if there's better understanding in a year or two.
  • qsort 7mo ago
    I think the argument is "a bit too nice," it isn't a binary, motivations are complicated and sometimes both feelings coexist. If I reflect for a moment about why I personally got into tech, I can find at least a few different reasons: - because I like solving problems. It's sad that the specific types of problems I used to do are gone, but it's exciting that there are new ones. - because I like using my skills to help other people. It's sad that one specific way I could do that is now less effective, but it's exciting that I can use my knowledge in new ways. - because I like doing something where I can personally make a difference. Again, it cuts both ways. I'm sure most people would cite similar examples.
  • magicalist 7mo ago
    Eh, it also feels like a classic "maybe we somehow have enough perspective on this watershed moment while it's happening to explain it with a simplistic dichotomy". Even this piece interrogates the feeling of "loss" and teases out multiple aspects to it, but settles on a tl;dr of "yep, dichotomy". There's more axes here too, where that feeling can depend on what you're building, who you're building it with, time and position in your career, etc etc. (I'll admit, though, that this also smells to me a bit too much like introvert/extrovert, or INTP/INTJ/etc so maybe I'm being reflexively rejective)
  • adriand 7mo ago
    I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom line a long time ago. The two emotions I personally feel are fear and excitement. Fear that the machines will soon replace me. Excitement about the things I can build now and the opportunities I’m racing towards. I can’t say it’s the most enjoyable experience. The combo is hellish on sleep. But the excitement balances things out a bit. Maybe I’d feel a sense of sadness if I didn’t feel such urgency to try and ride this tsunami instead of being totally swept away by it.
    • dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
      I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I see people doing with AI is making slop and CRUD apps and maybe some employee replacement systems or something but I don't see this transcendental experience that people are describing. I could see a mortgage collapse or something like that, maybe that's what is so exciting? I don't know.
      • k32k 7mo ago
        I think those comments are signalling something much deeper about the individual.
        • kaffekaka 7mo ago
          Signalling what? Please expand.
          • 7mo ago
  • sublinear 7mo ago
    The divide was never invisible and there has always been at least three camps. The "make-it-go" people couldn't make anything go back then either. They build ridiculous unmaintainable code with or without AI. Since they are cowboys that don't know what they're doing, they play the blame game and kiss a ton of ass. The "craft-lovers" got in the way just as much with their endless yak shaving. They now embrace AI because they were just using "craft" as an excuse for why they didn't know what they were doing. They might be slightly more productive now only because they can argue with themselves instead of the rest of the team. The more experienced and pragmatic people have always been forced to pick up the slack. If they have a say, they will keep scope narrow for the other two groups so they don't cause much damage. Their use of AI is largely limited to google searches like it always was.
    • saulapremium 7mo ago
      Let me guess: you happen to be one of these lone pragmatists in the sea of incompetent ass-kissers and yak-shavers who use AI for writing code?
      • sublinear 7mo ago
        I'm saying the majority of devs are neither ass-kissers nor yak-shavers.
  • hungryhobbit 7mo ago
    I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will vary between different humans. What makes AI different to me is the fear. Nobody decided not to use emacs because they were afraid it was going to take their job ... but a huge portion of the anti-AI crowd is motivated by irrational fear, related to that concern.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • yoyohello13 7mo ago
      It doesn’t help that the CEOs of these companies are hyping up the fear. It’s no wonder people are afraid when the people making the products are spouting prophecies of doom.
    • monknomo 7mo ago
      what about the fear is irrational?
    • g-b-r 7mo ago
      A huge portion of the pro-AI crowd is motivated by irrational hype and delusion. LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who enjoyed software development could like that.
      • cableshaft 7mo ago
        Pretty much anyone who's not you, will make code in an unpredictable way. I review other people's code and I go 'really, you decided to do it that way?' quite often, especially with coders with less years of experience than me. That's kind of how this is starting to feel to me, like I'm turning more into a project manager that has to review code from a team of juniors, when it comes to A.I. Although those juniors are now starting to show that they're more capable than even I am, especially when it comes to speed.
  • ehnto 7mo ago
    It's not a pure dichotomy though. I have always been both, and slowly mixing in agentic coding for work has left me some new headspace to do "trad" programming on side projects at home. I love the exciting ideation phase, I love putting together the puzzle that makes the product work, and I also take pride in the craft.
    • kaffekaka 7mo ago
      I agree with this. Using agents at work has increased the possibility of me having energy left to code by hand at home. So much coding at work is not fulfilling, it is boilerplate and I do not learn anything from writing the Xth variation of the same thing. Yes, those things should have been automated long ago, but they weren't, and now with coding agents much of them are.
  • suzzer99 7mo ago
    Enjoying something and getting satisfaction out of it are two different things. I don't enjoy the act of coding. But I enjoy the feeling when I figure something out. I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. I'm not sure I'll get either of those from claude.
    • cableshaft 7mo ago
      > I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age. Yeah, this is a concern. I remember when I took a break from coding to work as a video game producer for a couple of years and I felt like my ability to code was atrophying and that drove me nuts. Now I'm not so sure. There's just so much dumb garbage that's accumulated around coding nowadays, especially with web dev. So much time just gluing together or puzzling out how to get APIs or libraries to works and play nice together. It's not like back in the days where it was relatively simple with PHP and HTML, when I first started. Much less you could do back then, sure, but expectations were a lot lower back then as well. I might just content myself with doing Sudoku or playing/designing board games to help keep that brain plasticity going, and stop fighting so hard to understand all this junk. Or finally figure out how to get half-decent at shader math or something, at least that seems less trivial and ephemeral.
      • XorNot 7mo ago
        Everytime I've had to do any any webdev, I've usually just been frustrated by the fact that there's a vision of how powerful any particular architecture should be, and then all the confusion and boilerplate to try and get it there. And then it changes every 6 months or goes in circles - and I suppose now we just gave up and are letting LLMs YOLO code out the door with whatever works. Like I remember learning all about Redux Sagas, and then suddenly the whole concept is gone, but also I'm not actually particularly clear on what replaced it (might be time to go back to that well since I need to write a web interface soon again).
      • suzzer99 7mo ago
        My mom used to play Sudoku as part of her recommended therapy to stave off cognitive decline. Now she just plays solitaire on the iPad for hours on end, which I know isn't burning any new neural pathways. I'm afraid my inherent laziness will lead to something like that if I don't have to do it for my job.
  • appreciatorBus 7mo ago
    > nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful. To this day I remember being delighted by Perl on a regular basis. I wasn't concerned with the aesthetics of it, though I was aware it was considered inscrutable and that I could read & write it filled me with pride. So yea, programming Perl was delightful.
    • sonofhans 7mo ago
      Yes, this is what I thought, too. I did program in Perl because it was beautiful. No other computer language compares so favorably with human language, including in its ambiguity. Not everyone considers this a good feature :)
  • lmorchard 7mo ago
    > The web was objectively awful as a technology I, for one, remember when I could crash Netscape Navigator by using CSS too hard (i.e. at all) or trying to make a thing move 10px with DHTML. But I kept trying to make browser to thing.
  • forgetfreeman 7mo ago
    "The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable." Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a tendency to produce as many or more problems than it solved, and on more than one occasion I've seen developers of this stripe lose commit access to FOSS projects as a result of the low quality of their contributions. "nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful." Compared to trying to get stuff accomplished in C Perl was an absolute dream to work with and many devs I knew gravitated to web development specifically for their love of the added flexibility and expressiveness that Perl gave them compared to other commonly used languages at the time. Fortunately for us all language design and tooling progressed.
    • thedevilslawyer 7mo ago
      Generalize much? How would you feel if code-as-craft people were called out to be anti-social nerds who spent times on umpteenth rewrite and refactor, didn't care what impact that had on the actual user they were building for?
      • forgetfreeman 7mo ago
        I'd thank you for the laugh and assume you worked in project management, marketing, or some other low info industry segment. I've worked with hundreds of developers over my career and the only time I've brushed up against anyone who even approximates what you are describing would be in HN comment threads. The craft-oriented women and men I've had the pleasure of working with have without exception held user experience and the future sanity of other developers interacting with the code they wrote as core requirements, every project, every line of code. Getting it right the first time tends to cut down significantly on refactoring.
  • dale_glass 7mo ago
    > The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful. As an old school Perl coder, not true. Lots of people had a taste for Perl. TIMTOWTDI was sold as an actual advantage. Perl caters to things almost nobody else does, like the way you have a negative "if" in "unless" and placing conditions after the code. So you can do things like: frobnicate() unless ($skip_frobnicating); Which is sure, identical function-wise to: if (!$skip_frobnicating) frobnicate(); But is arguably a bit nicer to read. The first way you're laying out the normal flow of the program first of all, and then tacking on a "we can skip this if we're in a rare special mode" afterwards. Used judiciously I do think there's a certain something in it. The bigger problem with Perl IMO is that it started as a great idea and didn't evolve far enough -- a bunch of things had to be tacked on, and everyone tacked on them slightly differently for no real benefit, resulting in codebases that can be terribly fragile for no good reason and no benefit.
  • camgunz 7mo ago
    I think SWEs are genuinely pretty shocked and awed that codegen models can code at all, let alone code well. My guess is a lot of the agita around this is that people thought "I can code therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and then a machine comes by that can do pretty equivalent work and they're entirely unmoored. I sympathize with that, and I don't mean to dismiss it, but that's not what I feel. I really dislike this "doer vs. maker" binary stuff that comes up every now and again, as though everyone who thinks codegen models aren't perfect doesn't want to make anything. I really want to make things--good things--and I dislike the current hype wave behind codegen models because they often make it harder for me to make good things. I've used Claude Code to build a few big things at work; I ask it questions ("where does this happen", "we have problem X, give me 3 potential causes", etc); I have it review things before I post PRs; our code review bot finds real heisenbugs. I have mixed success with all of this, but even so I find it overall useful. I'd be irritated if some place I worked, current or present, told me I couldn't use Claude Code or the like. That said, I've not gotten it to be useful in: - building entire, complex features in brownfield projects - solving systemic bugs - system design/evolution - feature/product design and planning - replacing senior engineer code review It will confidently tell you it's done these things, but when you actually force yourself through the mental slog of reviewing its output, you'll realize it's failed (you also have to be an expert to perform this analysis). Now, maybe it fails in an acceptable way; maybe only slight revision is required; maybe it one-shots the change and verifying success isn't a big mental slog. Those are the good cases. More annoying are the times it fails totally and obviously, but the real nightmares are when it fails totally, yet imperceptibly. It also sometimes can do (some of) these things! But it's inconsistent, such that its successes largely serve to lower your guard against its failures. And the mental slog is real. The artifacts you have to produce/review/ensure the model adheres to are ponderous. The code generated is ponderous. Code review is even more tedious because there's no human mind behind the code, so you can't build a mental model of the author. Getting a codegen model to revise its work or take a different approach is very hit or miss. Revising the code yourself requires reading thousands and thousands of lines of generated code--again with no human behind it--and building a mental model of what's happening before you can effectively work, and that process is time-consuming and exhausting. I'm also concerned about the second-order effects. Because switching into the often-required deep mental focus is very difficult (borderline painful), I've seen many, many people reach for LLMs in those moments instead, first a little, then entirely. I've watched people copy/paste API docs into Gemini prompts to explain them. I've watched people unable to find syntax errors in code and paste it into ChatGPT to fix it. I'm confident I'm not the only person who's observed this, and it's a little maddening it's not getting more play. --- I'm not saying SWEs don't fail in similar ways. I've approved--and authored--human PRs that had insidious flaws with real consequences. I've been asked to "review" PRs pre-ChatGPT that were 10x the size they needed to be. I've seen people plagiarize code, or just copy/paste Stack Overflow constantly. The difference is we build process around these risks, everything from coding patterns, PR size limits, type systems, firing people, borderline ludicrous amounts of unit tests, CI/CD, design docs, staging environments, red/green deploys, QA lists, etc. I hate all of it! It's a constant reminder of my flaws and it slows down mean time to dopamine squirt of released code. I'd be the first person to give all this shit the axe. I would love to point Claude at the crushingly long list of PRs I have to review. But I can't, because it still has huge, huge flaws. Code review bots miss obvious problems, and they don't have enough context/knowledge about the system/bug/feature to perform a sufficiently comprehensive review. It would be a net time waste because we'd then have to fix a bug in prod or revise an already-deployed feature/fix--things I like even less than code review, if you can believe it. These models cannot adequately replace humans in other parts of the SDLC. But, because pesky things like design and code review cap codegen models' velocity, our industry is "rethinking" it all, with no consideration of the models' flaws; "rethinking" here meaning "we're considering having an LLM handle all our code review, or not doing it at all". The only way to describe that is reckless disregard. It's unprofessional and unethical. So, I think my grief isn't about "the craft". I don't think that's gone and I don't think I'd care if it were. My grief is about the humiliation of our profession, the annihilation of our standards and the betrayal of any representation we made to our users--indeed to ourselves. We deserve software systems that do what they say they do, and up until recently I really thought we were working hard to get there. I don't think that anymore; like many other things in our era (community, truth, curiosity, generosity, trust, learning, rationality, practice, compassion) it has retreated in the face of some flavor of self-interested, shallow grift. I really don't know how or why this happened, but regardless of the cause we truly are in a dark time.
• jacquesm 7mo ago
  There are far more divides than just that one. For instance, the ones that look at it from an economics perspective, security perspective, long term maintainability perspective and so on. For each of these there are pros and cons.
  • ares623 7mo ago
    all this so people like us can do a job that wasn't that hard to begin with and was actually very comfortable all things considered, just a tiny bit easier in a way that isn't even measurable.
    • randlet 7mo ago
      > a job that wasn't that hard to begin with The more experience I get the harder the job seems tbh
      • Avicebron 7mo ago
        Have you gotten to the part where you barely even get to write code anymore and just manage people's expectations full time yet?
        • mekael 7mo ago
          Ah, management without managing. Its depressing and engaging at the same time. Depressing because palace intrigue is exhausting and fraught with peril. Engaging because I love explaining things to people and watching everything click into place for them (see the 1 of 10k xkcd comic).
• CharlieDigital 7mo ago
  The divide is a matter of perspective. I'm a 23+ year dev; among the highest level ICs in my org. It's still craft, its just that the craft is different. I don't write *.ts, *.cs files anymore; I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift every developers level up by several notches. I went from building one kind of framework/platform level artifact to another type of framework/platform level artifact. If one's perspective is that it's just a shift in what "craft" means, then it's still craft. I'm still building systems; just a different kind of system.
  • jacquesm 7mo ago
    You're using it as a 'super compiler', effectively a code generator and your .md file is the new abstraction level at which you code. But there is a price to pay: the code that you generate is not the code that you understand and when things go pear shaped you will find that that deterministic element that made compilers so successful is missing from code generated from specs dumped into an AI. If you one-shot it you will find that the next time you do this your code may come out quite different if it isn't a model that you maintain. It may contain new bugs or revive old ones. It may eliminate chunks of the code and you'll never know and so on. There is a reason that generated code always had a bit of a smell to it and AI generated code is no different. How much time do you spend on verifying that it actually does what's written on the tin? Do you write your own tests? Do you let the AI write the tests and the code? Are you familiar with the degree to which AIs can be manipulated to do stuff that you thought they weren't supposed to? (A friend of mine just proved this to his boss by bribing an AI with a 'nice batch of pure random data' to put a piece of unreviewed code into production by giving itself the privileges required to do so...)
    • CharlieDigital 7mo ago
      We have human reviews on every PR. Quality and consistency are going up, not down. Partially because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than humans do and there is far less variance. Shortcuts that a human would make ("I'll just write a one-off here"), the agent does not...so long as our rules guide it properly ("Let me find existing patterns in the codebase."). Part of it is the investment in docs we've made. Part of it is that we were already meticulous about commenting code. It turns out that when the agents stumble on this code randomly, it can read the comments (we can tell because it also updates them in PRs when it makes changes). We are also delivering the bulk of our team level capabilities via remote MCP over HTTP so we have centralized telemetry via OTEL on tool activation, docs being read by the agents, phantom docs the agent tries to find (we then go and fill in those docs).
• kalalakaka 7mo ago
  [dead]
  • sesm 7mo ago
    Yep it's not 'result chasers' but people who want to get credit while avoiding real work. And when their stuff breaks they are always too busy with something else or moved on to another project.
  • skeeter2020 7mo ago
    This better matches my experiences and feelings than the divide which the author discusses. The craft is in the entire building, not specifically the coding aspects. I want to do a great job building a house, and if AI helps or even completes some aspects while meeting standards that's awesome. The problem is it hasn't yet shown it can be trusted as a sub trade, and we've got people outsourcing the entire project to an army of agents. The result looks a lot like the condo I bought a few years ago.
  • dang 7mo ago
    Could you please not create an account for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
• elliotbnvl 7mo ago
  Strong agree. Needs another pass or two at editing though, some painful LLM-os sticking out there :'(
  • lmorchard 7mo ago
    Which bits? And don't say the em-dashes because I've been over-using them since high school
• torben-friis 7mo ago
  Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that version will still require crafters. If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero. Everyone who's been around startup culture knows the running jokes about those 'I have a great idea, I just need someone to code it' guys. Now you're one, and you'll find how much ideas are worth.
  • operatingthetan 7mo ago
    >This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.
    • guelo 7mo ago
      Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time.
    • Roguelazer 7mo ago
      That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.
      • operatingthetan 7mo ago
        >lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone?
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• bonkabonka 7mo ago
  Yow, submitter sure isn't shy with their bias. Maybe defang the title?
  • dang 7mo ago
    Submitted title was "The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers" - which does seem to be a fair statement of what the article is about, and in that sense not so biased. We've reverted the title to be that of the article now, though, in keeping with the site guidelines, since it was neither misleading nor linkbaity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• api 7mo ago
  I'm a bit in the middle. I enjoy the craft but I also seek and enjoy the result. The thing about AI is that you don't have to use it for everything. Like any other tool you can use it as much as you'd like. Even though I like the craft, I find myself really enjoying the use of AI to do things like boilerplate code and simple tests. I hate crafting verbose grunt work, so I have AI do that. This in turn leaves me more time to do the interesting work. I also enjoy using AI to audit, look for bugs, brainstorm, and iterate on ideas. When an idea is solid and fleshed out I'll craft the hard and interesting parts and AI-generate the boring parts.
• frankc 7mo ago
  I think it's more granular than this, though. I also like to "make computer do thing" and have enjoyed using AI. But I also like building systems, optimizing systems. I find AI is a great partner in that. I can churn out prototypes more quickly, iterate on them more quickly etc. That also applies intra-system level. I might have a theory about how a different data structure or caching layer will affect application performance. It's now so much faster to test those kind of theories, and actually building good scaffolding around them to test them scientifically. Yes, sometimes I can also ask AI to evaluate things at the system level and it often has surprisingly good insights, but that is usually a collaboration where our powers combined comes up with a better solution. I enjoy that process, too. I do sympathize with the people "in mourning". I feel like this is really about how your identify is tied up in what you do. I have generally identified as a command line wizard. The xkcd of the guy flying in with "perl" very much speaks to me. But AI absolutely crushes at this. It's not that useful a skill anymore. Now I identify more as a local AI expert instead :D
  • beej71 7mo ago
    > I feel like this is really about how your identify is tied up in what you do. This is it for me. One thing that's important to my identify making things. And I have a lot of trouble saying I made a thing that I asked someone (or something) else to make for me. I know you're going to say, "But I'm making things, too!" However... I could crank out a project a day with Claude Code and slap them all up on GitHub for my green squares, and I could say that I made them all. Just like I could crank out a novel a day with ChatGPT and say that I made them all. Or I could use it to write 100 blog posts a day and say that I made them all. In all those cases, I caused things to get made. But did I make them? I don't feel like I can honestly say I did. (And the copyright office is starting to have a thing or two to say about it, as well.) This is what I struggle with. I like making things. As a capitalist, sure, your cash is good with me. Tell me where to shoot and I'll shoot. But in terms of keeping my soul fed, it's a tough one.
• PaulHoule 7mo ago
  You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.
  • gassi 7mo ago
    And contribute your changes back upstream, right?
    • autoexec 7mo ago
      Do we even want a bunch of people contributing slop upstream when (assuming it does anything worthwhile in the first place) somebody has to actually review/correct/document that code? A handful of well intentioned slop piles might be manageable, but AI enables spewing garbage at an unprecedented scale. When there's a limited amount of resources to expend on discussing, reviewing, fixing, and then finally accepting contributions a ton of AI generated contributions from random people could bring development to a halt.
  • danjl 7mo ago
    > I was afraid the puzzle-solving was over. But it wasn't—it just moved up a level. The craft can move up a level too. You still can make decisions about the implementation, which algorithms to use, how to combine them, how and what to test -- essentially crafting the system at a higher level. In a similar sense, we lost the hand-crafting of assembly code as compilers took over, and now we're losing the crafting of classes and algorithms to some extent, but we still craft the system -- what and how it does its thing, and most importantly, why.
  • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    You don't need AI for this, we've had search engines and good online resources for decades
    • reverius42 7mo ago
• keybored 7mo ago
  Every little minor dispute can be split into some arbitrary dichotomy which is vaguely defensible. Not interesting. Twelve years ago I would have the bright idea of why not make a little, just a tiny little (what I would call now) preprocessor for Java which does the same thing in less characters and is clearer. Everyone would love it. Of course no one loved it. Well, I never implemented it. Because I got some sense: you can’t just make tiny little preprocessors, a little code generation here and there, just code-generate this and tweak after the fact. Right? It’s not principled. You can cook up a dichotomy. Good for you. I think the approach is just space age technology meets Stone Age mindset. It’s Flintstone Engineering. It’s barely even serious. I am not offended that you took my craft. I am offended that you smear paint on the wall with three hundred parallel walls and painters and pick the best one. Or whatever Rube Setup is the thing that will take over the world as of thirty minutes ago. Make something rock solid like formal verification with LLM assist (or LLM with formal verification assist?). Something that a “human” can understand (at this point maybe only the CEO is left). Something that is understandable, deterministic. I might be out of a job. But I will not be offended. And I will respect it.
  • keybored 7mo ago
    Now about the grief angle. This is AI Inevitability Soothsaying.[1] It’s all just a backdrop for hammering home the same inevitabilism: GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. Just slap on whatever excuse to hammer this over, and over, and over. Grief, self-identity, some other pseudo-humanistic angle. Now is the time that programmers talk about their feelings. Give me a break. Because the AI hype machine isn’t content with just eventually taking your job or your craft. It can’t just quietly get exponentially better until it sweeps your legs effortlessly. No, because there’s also a market out there, and a hype needs to be built. So now you need to see it all day in your tech news aggregator. Just push all the interesting stuff out. Replace with autopilot. No, really. Even if AI worked perfectly right now you would still need to have a constant churn of content about how to babysit this thing that speaks English already and is more capable than you. I guess it’s kind of paradoxical. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607
• Ericson2314 7mo ago
  > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, Hell no. I, a craftsman, was going out of my way to use things like Haskell. I was very aware of the divide the entire time. The present is a relief.
• ptak_dev 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • kaashif 7mo ago
    Is this an expertly crafted joke response or an extremely depressing authentic AI sales pitch response?
    • jacquesm 7mo ago
      The latter, see GPs comment history.
      • dang 7mo ago
        Banned now.
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• totetsu 7mo ago
  This reminds me of the divide between Role-players and Number-chasers in the once-upon-a-time MUD players communities.
• dude250711 7mo ago
  I just do not want to deal with other people's AI-generated code.
  • HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
    Your AI can rewrite it to your own standards for free. You can tell your AI to read their code, and create a new requirements document for a clean-room implementation. Then you have your AI implement using your own requirements document.
    • skydhash 7mo ago
      In a review process?
    • toraway 7mo ago
      That doesn't sound like it would help while reviewing a PR full of verbose slop in your day job.
      • HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
        I feel like this could be improved by limiting the scope of the task given to GenAI, and also by giving it clear instructions on programming style, and tips to optimize the diff, for the PR reviewer.
    • g-b-r 7mo ago
      That sounds so reliable, I'm so confident it would get it right We're so screwed
• furyofantares 7mo ago
  Author doesn't care about their blog writing as craft, either (it's been fed through an LLM.)
  • suzzer99 7mo ago
    Am I the only one who comes to the comments first to see if the blog/article is even worth reading?
    • hackable_sand 7mo ago
      Yes
    • reverius42 7mo ago
      No
    • kaffekaka 7mo ago
      It's classified.
  • lmorchard 7mo ago
    Sure, I ran the post past an LLM for some ideas on clarity and tightening it up - but I wrote, edited, and published it myself.
    • furyofantares 7mo ago
      It's too bad it has so much grating LLM-voice. I don't think you typed all the LLM-isms, and they make it hard to know how much to trust that the rest is what you intended to convey.
      • lmorchard 7mo ago
        I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.
• blobbers 7mo ago
  Pointy haired bosses be looking for results. Engineers be loving the craft. It's a dance, but AI is unfortunately looking at us like we're dancing, and meanwhile it's built a factory.
• comrade1234 7mo ago
  I'm a craft lover but I like using the Ai for tedious tasks. Just today it tracked down a library conflict in a pom that from experience would have taken a day of trial and error.
  • layer8 7mo ago
    I think there are far fewer developers who reject it for search tasks, like the one you describe, than those who reject it for (production-)code generation tasks.
• Roguelazer 7mo ago
  The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably not well-prepared for. Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially more and better code than the people at my company spending all day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.
  • ctoth 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • g-b-r 7mo ago
      Stealing has been used for copyright infringement since forever, it is the correct word
  • sockgrant 7mo ago
    I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now. It’s not the same as writing code, but it’s fun. If your coworkers can’t outpace your code output they’re either not using opus4.6 or they aren’t really trying. It’s pretty easy to slam 20 PRs a day with some of them being complex changes. The hardest part is testing the diffs, but people are figuring that out too.
• School-Cotton 7mo ago
  People who say directing an AI is just "moving up another level of abstraction" are missing the point that it's a completely different kind of work. Everything from machine code to Haskell is a predictable deductive logical system, whereas AIs are not.
  • dang 7mo ago
    It's different, but it isn't completely different. That's one reason why it's hard to make sense of this change.
• HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
  I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. I use an iterative process. The implementation is the test of the requirements document. If it's not right, I adjust the doc, discard that implementation, and try again.
  • suzzer99 7mo ago
    > I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. Can you please come train the product people at my job? Maybe some of your love of the game will rub off on them.
• sarchertech 7mo ago
  I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers. It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. I don’t care about the beauty of the code, but I do care that nearly every app I load takes longer than it did 15 years ago. I do care that my HomePod tells my wife it’s having trouble connecting to iPhone every 5th time she adds something to the grocery list. I care that my brokerage website is so broken that I actually had to call tech support who told me that they know it’s broken and you have to add a parameter to go back to the old version to get it to work. I care that when I use the Claude desktop app it sometimes gives me a pop up with buttons that I can’t click on. I’ve used Claude and Cursor enough to have what I think are valid opinions on AI assisted coding. Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product. Understanding the problem is the biggest bottleneck. Knowing what to build and what not to build. The next big one is convincing everyone around you of that (sometime this takes even more time). After that, it’s obsessively spending time iterating on something until it’s flawless. Sometimes that’s tweaking an easing value until the animation feels just right. Sometimes that’s obsessing over performance, and sometimes it’s freezing progress until you can make the existing app bulletproof. AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product. It does help crank out one off tools. It does help me work in unfamiliar code bases, or code bases where for whatever reason I care more about velocity than quality. It helps me with search. It helps me rubber duck. All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.
  • epolanski 7mo ago
    > AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product. It can actually help a lot here too. In fact I rarely have AI author or edit code, but I have it all time researching, finding edge cases I didn't think about, digging into dependencies code, finding ideas or alternative approaches. My usage is 90% of the time assisting with information gathering, criticizing (I have multiple reviewer skills with different personas, and I have multiple LLMs run them), refining, reviewing. Even when it comes to product stuff, many of my clients have complicated business logic. Talking multi-tenant-company warehouse software where each process is drastically different and complexity balloons fast even for a single one of them. It helps to connect the dots between different sources of information (old Jira task, discord dumps, confluence, codebase, etc). And it can iteratively test and find edge cases in applications too, same as you would do manually by taking control of the browser and testing the most uncommon paths. I would do much less without this assistance. I really don't get why people focus so much on the least empowering part (code), where it actually tends to balloon complexity quick or overwhelm you with so much content and edits that you can't have the energy to follow while maintaining quality.
• epolanski 7mo ago
  There's no divide. Brilliant engineers, among the best software craftsmen out there are using AI daily and speeding up their processes. The author of Redis, antirez, stated a month ago he spent 2 weeks on Redis tinkering with LLMs...and it was just design phase, not a single line of code was authored. The ability to interrogate LLMs and have them criticize his ideas and edge cases sped up his process by month. He also used LLMs successfully to find multiple issues in Redis that would've took him longer to do without. I myself spend with AI way more time tinkering and gathering information than authoring code. Am I a craft lover or a result chaser? But sure, let's keep everything in the divide conservative vs liberal, black and white, craftsman vs vibe coder...give me a break..
  • antonvs 7mo ago
    Yeah. We’re seeing a lot of posts from people dealing with their emotions about AI, and trying to rationalize those emotions. Blaming a straw-manned group of other people who supposedly don’t share some quality the author values is an easy way to do that rationalization. The reductively binary classification is a sign that they’re indulging in something other than a serious analysis.
• nlawalker 7mo ago
  >I think recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the actually useful thing here. If you're mourning the loss of the craft itself—the texture of writing code, the satisfaction of an elegant solution—that's real, and no amount of "just adapt" addresses it. You might need to find that satisfaction somewhere else, or accept that work is going to feel different. Frankly, we've been lucky there's been a livelihood in craft up to now. The blog post is all about being clear-eyed about the source of grief, but doesn't seem to articulate that it's the livelihood that's gone, not the craft. There's never been a better time to practice the craft itself.
  • lmorchard 7mo ago
    Well, yeah, that's what a lot of folks are sad about - they can't practice the craft concurrently with the livelihood quite as much. But if you don't have a livelihood, you probably don't have as much space for craft at all.
    • rimunroe 7mo ago
      Exactly. I said this elsewhere in here, but I’ve felt extremely lucky that for the last 13 years I’ve gotten paid to do something that would otherwise have to be a hobby. The problem is that I have other hobbies already and am a parent with limited time to devote to such things in the first place. It’s valid to miss things you were extremely lucky to have in the first place.
• sdevonoes 7mo ago
  It’s sad not because of AI itself but because of the companies behind AI: we are now paying for every single line of code we produce. That sucks
  • Freak_NL 7mo ago
    Weird you got downvoted for that. This is exactly the thing which has been bothering me about all of this. Pre-LLM there are paid products and licenced stuff, but for the most part you could code in any language using free or community edition IDE's and mostly open toolchains. The total requirement for me as an individual to start using some language or stack is owning a computer and having internet access. Both provided by a stable market with consumer choice. Post-LLM there is now this blackbox of a service which you depend on and for which someone is picking up a not-insignificant tab where the costs currently seem massively subsidised, and which is getting to be a requirement for your skill set. Open local models? Fine, but who is training them? How will those stay up-to-date? Oh, and then there is the not-quite-insignificant ecological aspect and that bit where the powers-that-be seem to have collectively decided that copyright doesn't really apply here.
• RegW 7mo ago
  I don't know how I feel about this. I started programming in 1979. I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result. I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit. Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that. Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests. I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years? Are we 80% of the way there yet?
  • antonvs 7mo ago
    > Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. Clearly you don’t use Amazon’s Alexa.
• ernesto905 7mo ago
  > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages Throughout college I would see a pretty stark divide, where most people would use vscode on mac or on Windows + WSL. But there was a small minority who would spend alot of time 'tinkering' (e.g, experiment with OS like nix/gentoo, or tweaking their dev environment). Maybe i'm misunderstanding what a 'craft lover' means here but it seemed to me, at the time, that the latter camp had more technical depth just based on conversation. Can't speak to the result in terms of test scores. Though it would be interesting to see any data on that if it exists.
• wiml 7mo ago
  I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Yes, I've spent many fruitful hours writing basic CRUD apps but now that's easily done by libraries/frameworks I'm not eager to go back. Memory management, type systems, higher level languages, no-/low-code systems that completely remove me from some parts of the design loop, etc etc etc. All great: the point of computer programming is to have the computer do things so we don't have to. I think the real divide we're seeing is between people who saw software as something that is, fundamentally, improvable and understandable; and people who saw it as a mysterious roadblock foisted upon them by others, that cannot really be reasoned about or changed. And oddly, many of the people in the second category use terminology from the first, but fundamentally do not believe that the first category really exists. (Fair enough; I was surprised at the second category.) It's not about intelligence or whatever, it's a mindset or perspective thing.
  • randomNumber7 7mo ago
    > It's not about intelligence or whatever, it's a mindset or perspective thing. I agree with everything except this last sentence. What you wrote looks highly intelligent and I would suspect a lot of people in the second camp are not up to par with this.
    • hinkley 7mo ago
      Wise+intelligent people realize that intellectualizing every fucking thing in their life is a trap, and that they should rely more on other things. Not the least of which is buy-in, which is often not about rationality either. It might take intelligence to notice the problem, but we all know people who haven’t and some who might never. My previous job has the oldest I’ve ever met and I wanted to strangle him at least once a week. I haven’t added anyone to my Do Not Hire list in over a decade. Except him. He made himself indispensable at every opportunity and had some of the most convoluted code (and vocabulary) I’ve encountered in a long time. I spent way too much time extracting his claws from code I’d written that he made an absolute hash of.
• skeledrew 7mo ago
  > These are real feelings about real losses. I'm not here to argue otherwise. I'll argue it. Technically, there's no loss IMO, only gain. Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them. But now result chasers can get results faster in their chasing. Or get results at all. I'm a proud result chaser now making serious progress on various projects that I've had on ice anywhere from months to years and occasionally lamented not having time/energy for them. And I also note my stable of tools, for both AI-related dev and other things, has grown greatly in a short period of time. And I'm loving it.
  • rimunroe 7mo ago
    > Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them. …except time, which sadly is limited. I’m sad about the real potential that I might not get to be paid to do something I enjoy so much anymore. I care about end products for sure, but that’s not why I’m in this career. I do this because a large part of the work engages me in a pleasant way. I like TDDing in a tight loop. I like how it forces me to think one step at a time, how I get to stop myself from jumping ahead, and how I get to verify my thoughts or theories within seconds. I find efficiently manipulating text in my editor satisfying. I love the feeling of being validated that my architectural choice was right when a spec changes and the required code change is obvious, minimal, and clearly expressed. I enjoy the feeling of obtaining mastery for mastery’s sake rather than because it lets me create a product. I’ve felt incredibly lucky for over a decade that my work gave me the opportunity to chase that. I may find enjoyment in wrangling AI, but I’m skeptical it’ll scratch that itch. If it doesn’t and I wanted to still scratch it, I’d have to do it on my own time. That would mean sacrificing time I’ve previously spent on other interests, and I don’t have a ton of time to begin with.
    • skeledrew 7mo ago
      > sacrificing time I’ve previously spent on other interests I'd say this is the crux of the matter. Having competing interests and choosing what to do and how much of it is a balancing act, but you can still get that desired satisfaction. You could perhaps even start your own company if it's that important to you. For me, projects just keep accumulating regardless of how much time I dedicate to them (outside of the mandatory things). Maybe I just have too many things I'd like to build. Definitely thinking about starting a company myself now there's all this capability available.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• gneuron 7mo ago
  This is the defining divide of AI, period. Whether you're a craft lover of art, writing, music, code, hell, business processes and the idea of "doing work." There are those who love the craft, and those who want the result of the craft. AI is a faster path to that end result (whether you're happy with that result is another matter). From that POV, it could lead to us speed-running our civilization into another era; abundant prosperity, or full on collapse. Bro...
• hofo 7mo ago
  There’s a similar divide in the woodworking community between people that use CNC and the like to mill and shape wood vs those that use hand and power tools.
  • kaffekaka 7mo ago
    Isn't the question really about what you can get paid for, have as your job? People want to keep doing what they enjoy as their fulltime profession, making a (good) living out of it. Perfectly understandable. But neither AI, powertools or image generation is preventing someone from doing craft coding, hand woodworking or drawing/painting in their spare time and enjoying it. I love drawing but since it went out of business as a viable career long before I was born I have never felt the grief of losing it. With craft coding we happen to exist at the point in time where it suddenly gets significantly de-crafted.
• daft_pink 7mo ago
  It kinda reminds me of the first time I visited a maker space years ago. It was full of cutting edge lasers cutters, 3-D printers, oscilloscopes. I’m doing the tour they told us we could make anything. Then the tour ended. I get to meet the real users and they showed me what they made. Most people just made random things like etching Pokémon into their pencil case. I left thinking wow these people could make anything and that’s what they made. All I’m saying is if you give the average person something that Lockheed Martin is using to build the SR 71. The average person would probably just use it to make a toy car and that SR 71 is not going to get built.
  • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    The average person can't afford the materials to build an SR 71 but they can afford a pencil case.
• jaredcwhite 7mo ago
  I'm just not buying this framing. At all. I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be mourning. I'm using my skills and continuing in my craft the way I have for several decades and the way I will continue to for several more. I eschew the LLMs not because they are threatening to me, but because they are unsound products built & promoted by people who are fundamentally sociopathic. If I am to mourn, I can mourn the unveiling of deep ethical lapses across the entire tech industry. They were clearly there already, we just didn't realize that if you were to put any random assemblage of techies into a room, a decent handful of them are sadly unethical people lacking a moral compass. We know that now. They love LLMs, because they love power and they dislike having to forgo perceived "utility" by recognizing the importance of caring for others in a community. While they do their utmost to demolish craft & artistry & tradition, I will be doing my utmost to preserve & defend all of those things. I am no stranger to boycotts, and I certainly don't suffer from FOMO. And I'm thankful I know a whole lot of people who feel much as I do.
  • mllev15 7mo ago
    Completely agree. This is the framing people use to cope with their moral and psychological failure. Using tools that are literally scorching the earth just so they don’t have to use their brains anymore.
  • wulfstan 7mo ago
    100% with you. I start a new job on Monday and I intend to keep building great young engineers who love their craft and their community. Enough of this vampiric unethical horse manure.
• est 7mo ago
  I wonder what happens if Claude was exploited by hackers and all chat logs were released one day. Nearly every corp secrets would be instant leaked.
  • heavyset_go 7mo ago
    What happens when providers achieve AGI, as they claim, and then use what they've learned from your company's prompts, context, memory and outputs to put you out of business Even without AGI, that internal source code, data and trade secrets are valuable on their own. Would suck if someone capitalized on it
• Yanko_11 7mo ago
  [dead]
• koenschipper 7mo ago
  I think I'm in the middle, at first I was definitely against using any AI because I loved the craft. But over the past 12-18 months I've been using it more and more. I still love to code just by hand for an fun afternoon. But in the long-term, I think you are going to be left behind if you refuse to use AI at all.
  • vaylian 7mo ago
    "Left behind" in terms of speed or are there other aspects that people are missing out on?
    • ares623 7mo ago
      It's this season's "have fun staying poor"
    • cableshaft 7mo ago
      Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah. A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based A.I. coding before that). I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting feedback on how something should look. Something that would have taken me an hour or more each time they wanted a change or something new added. Now that cuts both ways, as it started to seem like they were expecting that to be the new normal and I started to feel like I had to keep doing that or make it seem like I'm not actually working. And it gets exhausting keeping up that pace, and I started worrying when anything did take me extra time.
      • wiseowise 7mo ago
        > I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting feedback on how something should look. Seems like a nightmare.
• simianwords 7mo ago
  The split is about people who care about the commerce behind software development vs people who care about the craft. Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic about unit tests and clean code an so on. If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce because coding is an artistic expression.
  • wiseowise 7mo ago
    Your generalization are as useful as me saying that people in the first camp are just sloppy workers who dump their subpar code on others in hope that they’ll never need to touch it again.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• fellowniusmonk 7mo ago
  I love developing clever algorithms and writing elegant code. It's a hobby of mine and it makes me happy. I love shipping tangible products because it makes others happy and makes me money. Do what you love for work and you'll never love anything again. Do what you love for a hobby and keep it pure. Don't let either be your identity, you only diminish yourself and grow old in the doing.
• wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.
  • Gud 7mo ago
    The real split is between the capital owners, who live on our labour, typically through inheritance of a piece of paper that says they own a percentage of what I make.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • khafra 7mo ago
      Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
      • Gud 7mo ago
        I agree.
      • forgetfreeman 7mo ago
        "Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all." That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.
• FabianCarbonara 7mo ago
  For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm working at now gets automated too?
  • tovej 7mo ago
    Is it really valid to call it "ingenuity" if you weren't able to execute projects before? Gen-AI has not enabled me to develop anything I wasn't able to do before, and I consider myself to be an average developer.
    • FabianCarbonara 7mo ago
      I would say so ;-) Right now AI is a powerful tool for me. It helps me express ingenuity on a more abstract level, e.g. conceptual or product thinking rather than implementation details. Some of my current projects I could have built without AI, but not in the time I had. AI moved them from unrealistic to actually doable.
      • tovej 7mo ago
        What are these ingenious projects then, pray tell?
        • FabianCarbonara 7mo ago
          Have a look at my blog! Is linked in my profile :)
          • tovej 7mo ago
            you have three entries, none of them seem to be about a specific project, all of them seem to be about ways of setting up agentic development. I'm not going to comb them for crumbs. Surely you can just tell me: what is, in your opinion, the best project to showcase what AI coding methods can achieve? Preferrably a project that is polished enough that it can actually be applied somewhere. I never get answers when I ask _what_ people actually build using AI. Please tell me.
• jigglypuff-mab 7mo ago
  This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding shifting in ways I didn't expect. The grief isn't really about losing the craft—it's about losing the context where that craft made sense. When I started, "good code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now? The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500 lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds. What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more... untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone who likes making things work. Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to how they worked vs. people who tied it to what they built.
• Garlef 7mo ago
  I like both worlds: Tinkering and vibe coding. My shift in perspective is really: Not all code deserves to be hand-crafted. Some stuff can be wonky as long as it does it's job. (And I think the wonkyness will reduce in vibe-coding as harnesses improve)
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• amelius 7mo ago
  There's two kinds of developers. The first one would never become a manager because they like coding too much. The other one would become a manager at the first opportunity. It is obviously the second group that is benefiting from AI the most (because not everybody can be a manager).
  • vb7132 7mo ago
    True, there are people who are good with people. And they should totally become managers. But there are also the third kind: who like to design the systems and let them be built by someone else..
• vb7132 7mo ago
  Having managed developers for over five years, I have seen two categories of devs (to simplify the argument, let's focus just on the smart ones): - one group loves to work independently and gets you the results, they are fast and they figure things out - second group needs direction, they can be creative in their space but check-ins and course corrections are needed. AI feels like group1 but it's actually group2. In essence, it doesn't fully fit in either group. I am still figuring out this third group.
• somewhereoutth 7mo ago
  Really the distinction is between those that can see the bigger picture, and those that only see what is in front of them. Of course the immediate gratification of LLMs appeal to the latter, whereas the former is all too aware of the systemic downside of such automated content generation.
• bushido 7mo ago
  Before AI, as a head of product (who has always written code), I did this thing where when I was thinking through an idea or a product direction, I built the solution three or four times before I found the shape and direction that I liked. And once I liked it, I put it on a roadmap for one or more of my teams to execute on. Candidly saying before AI is a little disingenuous, because since AI has gotten better in the last year at coding, my workflow has gone back to exactly what it was when I had a 40-person team reporting to me. I still go through three, four iterations before a final direction is picked. It still takes me two, three weeks to think through an idea. Three things have changed. 1. When I think of a possible direction, a new version gets spun up within minutes to a couple of hours, usually in a single shot. 2. I can work through more big ideas which require some amount of coding-based ideation than I could previously. 3. And when a direction is decided on, the idea comes in to deliver the outcomes at a much quicker pace. Previously, it could have been 1 month of ideation + 2-8 sprints, now it's 2-4 weeks of ideation and 1-2 days to final delivery. All in all, while I can see where the author is coming from, the grief has been different for me. I've had a lot of good developers, product managers, product owners, and designers that have had the privilege of helping develop their skills in the past. That was the necessity of ensuring that we were developing talent who would then go on to produce good work on our teams. And I'm at a stage now where a three-person team that I have can produce more than the 40 could, and I am likely never going to need to develop the skills the way I used to. The loss is not from coding, I thoroughly enjoy how that's evolved. The loss is from the white space around it.
• mrob 7mo ago
  The optimal amount of generative AI in the world is zero. There are three possible scenarios, all of them bad: 1. Weaker than expected AI. Great Depression 2.0. Widespread poverty and suffering as the enormous investments already made fail to pay off. 2. AI works as expected. Dystopia. A few trillionaires gain absolute control of the entire world, and everyone else is enslaved or killed. 3. Stronger than excepted AI. Hard take-off singularity scenario. Extinction of all biological life. It's probably hopeless to resist at this point, but we should at least try.
  • negroesrnegro 7mo ago
    you may notice tbat the same people benefit from 1 and 2 and 3 is just a fantasy sold to the plebs to detract attention from 1 and 2 what a councidence
  • sathish316 7mo ago
    You do realize that AI seems magical because text response is converted into actions or tool calls. The AI is deciding the order in which the tools get called to fulfill your prompts. True Intelligence of Type 2 and 3 above needs to formulate, plan, analyse tradeoffs, think critically and solve novel unforeseen problems.
  • rglover 7mo ago
    I had a similar opinion until I started to see a flood of outages, data leaks, money being pulled, etc starting to crop up right as co's started hailing AI as the second coming. Now? I'm waiting for the inevitable reality check. AI doesn't go away (I personally don't want it to; it's a power tool for an experienced dev), but imo, the market is not too far from correcting the hype. Reality can only shoulder so much bs before the rubber has to hit the road. The promises being made over the last few years are not being fulfilled and big money likes results, not talk. So, unless we get another (significant) rabbit coming out of the hat in 2026, the momentum (again, imo) won't be there to sustain the necessary long-term growth (i.e., in terms of mass-adoption, this era of AI is closer to AOL than Facebook).
• woodenbrain 7mo ago
  This resonates with me. I got into development exactly because I wanted to make things useful to me, with limited background in programming, over 20 years ago. Tech eventually got in the way. I was so bored with sandboxes, entitlements, signing apps, etc. The joy was gone. Now I am developing a new app with AI help. I may not be using the tools optimally but I don't care, it's a process. And it's a lie that this is a fast process. I have been working on one app for months, and now I have a pretty solid new app to show for it. Looking for MacOS Apple Music users for beta testers, BTW. Please have a look. https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html
• ontouchstart 7mo ago
  The consumer/producer dichotomy misses another aspect of coding, with or without AI. About a decade ago, STEM education was trendy and everyone was getting Lego, Raspberry Pi etc to build robots and writing Python in the name of STEM. You can ask LLM what STEM standards for. The Maker movement is not about consuming or producing for consumption. Some people might get incentive to be influencers and profit off it. But the majority of the kids who went through this process become adults and moved on to be producer/consumer and playing with AI now. I believe their curiosity and creativity. Don’t worry, life will find its way.
• tcgv 7mo ago
  That's an interesting take. I'm likely on the same side of the split as you, since I'm very much motivated by the new possibilities agentic coding tools open when used responsibly. Back in February, I also wrote a piece on the recurring mourning/sense of grief we are seeing for 'craftsmanship' coding: - https://thomasvilhena.com/2026/02/craftsmanship-coding-five-stages-of-grief https://thomasvilhena.com/2026/02/craftsmanship-coding-five-...
• tyleo 7mo ago
  I think there is a split but I don’t think it’s between people who love hand-crafting things vs not. I love hand crafting things, yet I’m waking up like a kid on Christmas every day, running to my computer to use Claude code. For my critical apps I review every line. For 1-off things, I’ve had Claude build single-serving applications. If I had to guess the split is more between folks who have curiosity about the new technology and folks who fear things changing. With a decent center on that Venn Diagram of folks who feel both.
• oytis 7mo ago
  I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored them or created conditions for their success and growth.
  • throw310822 7mo ago
    Disagree. I think it was always obvious to me that there are at two kinds of developers. To make an extreme example: developer A writes long, sometimes tedious, security-minded, thoroughly tested code, and has written the CI pipelines too. When tasked with some ticket, they'll develop it to the letter, not one inch further, and even if it makes zero sense from the point of view of the users. Developer B knows nothing of that, doesn't write tests, can't be arsed about security and has no idea of how to deploy stuff, but thinks backwards from what the users (or other developers, or their future self) might like a lot and tries to make that. Both have been useful, though the first kind usually much more appreciated (maybe because it's really essential, while type B's contributions are harder to measure). Probably AI has come a little bit earlier for type A, but type B will follow soon anyway. In the meanwhile, they're enjoying the ride a bit more since AI takes care of all the tedious but essential details.
  • adverbly 7mo ago
    This says nothing about where people find enjoyment. I like doing puzzles. I like it more than planning. At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing, but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.
    • cherry_tree 7mo ago
      > I like doing puzzles Meaning you like to put the pieces in, or you like to figure out where they should go? To me that’s the crux of the article.
• JetSetIlly 7mo ago
  I think the split is between people who are in a hurry and those who are not. I'm not in a hurry and so choose not to spend money to get a quicker result. Taking time to solve a problem myself is pleasurable and I make no apologies for that. Horses for courses.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• andai 7mo ago
  You can just turn the AI off. I think that's a good idea to do regularly, in the same way it's good to have some time every day without screens and internet in your life. I did some "trad coding" to see how much I'd atrophied, and I was startled at how difficult and unpleasant it was. I was just stuck and frustrated almost the whole time! But I persisted for 7 hours and was able to solve the problem. Then I remembered, actually it was always like that! At least when doing something unfamiliar. That's just what programming feels like, but I had stopped being used to it because of the instant gratification of the magic "just fix my problem now" button. In reality had spent 7 hours in "learning mode", where the whole point is that you don't understand yet. (I was moving almost the whole time, but each new situation was also unfamiliar!) But if I had used AI, it would have eliminated the struggle, and given me the superficial feeling of understanding, like when you skim a textbook and think "yeah I know this part" because you recognize the page. But can you produce it? That's the only question that matters. I think that's going to become a very important question going forward. Sure, you don't need to produce it right now. But it's mostly not for right now. Just like you don't "need" to run and lift weights. But what happens if you stop?
  • ugtr3 7mo ago
    Yep. Something people overlook is the necessary need to condition oneself to enjoy something painful. Just like going gym and lifting weights. Without being exposed to this, you’re not gonna be a good problem solver in the long run.
• ernst_klim 7mo ago
  > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. I would argue that the split existed before AI and these camps were not the same. There were always "Quality first" people and "Get the shit done ASAP" people. Former would go for a better considerations, more careful attitude towards dependencies. Latter would write the dirty POC code and move on, add huge 3rd party libs for one small function and so on. Both have pros and cons. Former are better in envs like Aerospace or Medtech, latter would thrive in product companies and web. The second cathegory are the people who are happy the most about AI and who would usually delegate the whole thing to the agents from start to finish including the review and deployment.
• maplethorpe 7mo ago
  I suppose I see the split a little bit differently. To me it's more that one camp of developers can still get a hit of satisfaction as if they built something themselves even if it was entirely generated by AI. Would they get the same satisfaction from cloning a public repo? Probably not. It's too clear to their brain that they didn't have anything to do with it. What about building the project with cmake? That requires more effort, yes, but the underlying process is still very obviously something that someone else architected, and so the feeling of satisfaction remains elusive. AI, however, adds a layer of obfuscation. For some, that's enough to mask the underlying process and make it feel as if they're still wielding a tool. For others, not so much.
  • orsorna 7mo ago
    I don't follow your analogy at all. Suppose I want to build an application with xyz features. My research yields that there are no such applications that include xyz features. However, there are plenty of applications that might have x feature, y feature or z feature, or a combination of two, but not all three. If there are no such applications, I don't have a choice but to write it myself. This could take some time, especially if an MVP is all I'm interested in. LLMs are a novel tool in building an MVP. If time is a constraint, I can use an LLM, which should excel since xyz features are in its training set. I suppose your analogy follows for developers who write applications that support abc features even though there are already applications out there that support abc features. Yes, I don't think that is very interesting. Your umpteenth clone of Snake is not interesting.
    • orsorna 7mo ago
      Further, I don't argue that 100% prompting an application together isn't building something themselves. Built on the shoulders of leviathans, as libraries were built on the shoulders of giants of yore. But an application that combines xyz features is novel in this scenario. There is inherent value in that.
      • maplethorpe 7mo ago
        I'm not arguing whether AI has value as a code-generating application. I'm more interested in whether you, as a developer, still get satisfaction from building with AI, the same way you would get satisfaction if you built it yourself.
• yomismoaqui 7mo ago
  People sure like manichaeism.
• starkparker 7mo ago
  > I grieve for the web I've known. Not for writing HTML by hand, but I grieve for the open web as an ecosystem. These seem more related than is stated. Shifting creation from individual people to corporate-owned AI tools is another step from being able to write it yourself in the common venue of the web, to being forced to either submit to owned tools or be relegated out of the mainstream. We're still in a sort of purgatory between the two, but the DIY web is creeping into the rear view, and every moment of proprietary generative AI adoption accelerates it.
• countWSS 7mo ago
  Sure, is there anyone nostalgic for debugging bash files by hand? Any sense of grief for writing C++ template headers, with all boilerplate? Hmm, does anyone like manually re-writing makefiles these days? I suspect the enthusiasts of coding craft will struggle to maintain their wonder after ~4h deep in any of these magical adventures, which surely involve inventing ad-hoc duct tape and novel, never-before-seen algorithms.
• oxag3n 7mo ago
  > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. "Writing code by hand" - more result oriented engineers became managers. Editors - I don't believe Vim/Emacs used by both camps evenly. Languages - in my field, most make-it-go people use Python and when large data is involved Python/Java with Hadoop. The craft-lovers prefer bespoke solutions when feasible, running it in a single box. Version control - may be, but only after it got popularized by the GitHub. Products - would make-it-go people ever create the 'git' in the form that made it a success?
• roncesvalles 7mo ago
  In my experience, the grief goes away when you realize that making the LLM do useful stuff is very much not a solved problem and that there is ample room for creativity here. And that once you fully lean into this part of software engineering, all the other stuff becomes interesting again. I highly recommend if anyone is demotivated from software engineering to write their own orchestrator or Ralph loop or sub agent system whatever it is that makes LLM actually work for you, exactly in the way you want it to work. And then to go back to your projects again. Because now the LLM is a part of you. It's no longer a vending machine, it's a gundam suit.
• nerdright 7mo ago
  There's still going to be some craftsmanship tho, right? I think software is evolving to be like a factory. Sure, you may not care much about each part of the factory, but the way these parts fit together to produce the desired value/output is still craft IMO. I have personally started enjoying this part and it's actually becoming pretty fun.
• johnthescott 7mo ago
  automate your fate.