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> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine
by applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...
Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
- lelanthran 5mo ago> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software. A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe). Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
- witx 5mo ago> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. You took this statistic out of your rear end?
- lelanthran 5mo ago> You took this statistic out of your rear end? We are less than a year into good-enough coding agents, and as of right now there is not a single job opening I see that offers a salary for non-AI output.
- witx 5mo ago[flagged]
- lelanthran 5mo ago[flagged]
- lemiffe 5mo agoyou are saying this based on your own experience but YMMV, it is not universally true, specially not in developing countries
- lelanthran 5mo ago> you are saying this based on your own experience but YMMV, it is not universally true, specially not in developing countries My experience of job postings advertised is exactly the same as everyone else's for the same filters. This is not a "my personal feeling is that...", this is "I can't find an advertisement, posting or role that doesn't demand, instruct or promise that the successful candidate would be working closely with AI". We're less than a year in, and I do not see dev jobs advertised on (for example) indeed.com with any sort of criteria omitting AI. Imagine what it would look like in 5 years.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoI have never used indeed.com before, but I just took a look and the very first software engineer posting I looked at doesn't make a single mention of AI. You have a penchant for making easily falsifiable assertions.
- witx 5mo agoI guess he's someone with money invested in all this and is astroturfing. I've seen quite a few of them on here
- lelanthran 5mo ago> I guess he's someone with money invested in all this and is astroturfing. Says the guy with a pseudonym, active only since 2022.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIs this like the job ads that demanded 5+ years of experience with React, when React had only been in release for 3 years?
- onion2k 5mo agoIt is fairly obvious that the majority of people who buy software (>99%) don't really care how it's built. They care a lot about the outcome of using it, they care a little bit about whether there are bugs or not, and they care about the cost a lot, but beyond that nothing seems to matter to the purchaser. Even obvious things like whether or not there are tests, documentation, SLAs for fixes, or backwards compatibility between versions don't really seem to matter much. That doesn't mean you couldn't carve out a niche providing hand built software to people it does matter to, because the software industry is large, but saying 'zero percent of the market isn't willing to pay for it' isn't really wrong. It's just a rounding error that does care. (One massive caveat though ... the argument assumes that 'hand built' means 'higher quality than AI-assisted', and that's probably not true for >99% of developers.)
- josephg 5mo ago> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.
- p-e-w 5mo agoPeople can’t even reliably recognize AI art anymore. The classic “AI images were everywhere in 2023, but I rarely see them now” phenomenon.
- nkrisc 5mo agoI see a lot more bad art now. I suspect most of it is AI, but I can’t prove it.
- taybin 5mo agoWhat are you talking about? They’re so ubiquitous.
- spacechild1 5mo agoIt's mostly pretty easy to recognize.
- avocadoking 5mo agoOnly if the quality is bad. And users normally can only judge this when something is not working. So maybe only badly written/tested software will get labeled ai slop.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. This is a provably false statement, given that eg. Handmade Hero exists and sold a bunch of pre-orders despite never coming close to completion, and spawned an entire community that prides themselves on handmade software. There are also content creators like Tsoding who make a living by having people watch them do handmade coding for the love of the craft. Some non-zero percentage of people will also always be willing to pay a premium for superior-quality software. The author's thesis isn't that LLMs can produce S-grade software but that 'nobody cares' about quality and that C-grade software is good enough. While it's true that software quality isn't greatly valued at scale, I think the minority who care is larger than the minority who care about premium woodworking goods, particularly because as an artisan software developer you more or less have access to the global market of every single person who cares, while as an artisan woodworker you mostly only have access to the market of people in your town who care. This also overlooks that LLMs are politically divisive and there are movements to boycott them and shame people for using them. There's a niche for organic, free-range, vegan, etc. products at the supermarket for conscientious objectors, there will undoubtedly be such a niche for software. All the more so if LLMs reach a point where they actually are putting everyone out of a job, they will get much more divisive. There was already an assassination attempt against Altman and his promises to destroy everyone's livelihood haven't even come to fruition.
- jmkni 5mo agoDepends what you mean by woodworking I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)
- mcmcmc 5mo agoMost people would just call that construction
- bitmasher9 5mo agoSpecifically a carpenter.
- jmkni 5mo agoConstruction working entirely with wood If only there was another word for that...?
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoCarpentry is not the same thing as woodworking, to be fair. The latter has the connotation of making furniture, trim, and other such items that people want to look nice. Carpentry does not necessarily have that connotation. It's a kind of "all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares" situation.
- phainopepla2 5mo agoWood construction is not typically considered woodworking, although there is often a lot of overlap. But the skills needed to make furniture are pretty different from the skills needed to make decks, fences, etc.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- wfleming 5mo agoCustom furniture/cabinetry is already a pretty tough market, and woodworking is such a common programmer hobby that if a significant chunk of us decided to make a go of it the market would get heavily oversupplied pretty fast :). I’ve had people tell me I should try selling some of the furniture I make and my response is always that I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career once, I don’t intend to make that mistake again, and at least software still pays pretty well.
- variodot 5mo agoI'm threading this now and have paired AI-assisted development with woodworking knowledge. Partially chose to work on this because I wanted to build in a domain that the models might have a tougher time understanding. Parallels and interests overlap everywhere between programming and woodworking; decisions about tooling, tolerances, sequencing, and what can be easily fixed later. The models get rectangles pretty well and has been fun exploring a parametric casework planner for my own shop.
- runamuck 5mo agoI have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.
- throwaway63467 5mo agoYou assume there are enough of these jobs to go around and that you can just show up and do some extremely intricate work. Repairing historic doors and more elaborate woodworking isn’t easy to learn as the knowledge mostly doesn’t exist online anywhere, I also own a historic house and often ask the top tier LLMs for details e.g. about my staircase, they always give wrong answers as this knowledge is simply too exotic and not in their training set. And no one online talks about these things, 99 % of woodworking videos on YouTube are focus on beginners, you can’t replace a professional education watching videos and reading books. That will protect woodworkers with these skills of course but it’s wrong to assume you can just break into this market and be successful, most devs with woodworking hobbies are really shit at their craft and struggle to create even a regular elaborate cabinet, no way they will be able to compete with good craftsmen for these few lucrative projects.
- IshKebab 5mo agoYou paid $4k because it's a niche task that isn't much in demand.
- GeoAtreides 5mo agoyou need some explicit /s in there, i'm afraid it's too dry
- 5701652400 5mo agolook at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.
- trumpdong 5mo agoYou are not allowed to have land without participating in the economy. The government forced you to acquire land by buying it, and to pay taxes in dollars.
- 5701652400 5mo agoI mean you can sell surplus to market. but key point you do not pay taxes on food you grown on your backyard and eat yourself! nor you are subject to any market collapse. as long as sun shines and raind pours, your food grows in your backyard, no matter S&P or inflation rates.
- trumpdong 5mo agoYou pay tax on owning land.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago> get a pot of land and grow your own food Rejecting industrialized society is actually very expensive
- 5701652400 5mo ago"industrialized society" just rejected 160,000 sofware engineers this year. other industries are no better. you are either wage-slave barely making it. or getting laid off, as those people are not needed.
- 5mo ago