Discussion
Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
jazz9k: The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it.Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.
PaulKeeble: Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.
lmorchard: Meanwhile, Undertale, one of the most celebrated video games, famously has a 1000+ line switch statement and AI had nothing to do with it. Sometimes you have to bang out something that works, just to even get the chance to be annoyed at how bad it is for next version.
RcouF1uZ4gsC: I don’t think this split is fundamental or permanent.Look at photography.You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.
charcircuit: >The market is penalizing them for it.I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.
lmorchard: No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.
abracadaniel: If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.
RagnarD: One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
eadwu: Craft is caring about the x in y = mx + b, while the so called "it's a means to an end" care about the y.The difference between "craft lovers" and "doers" is that one operates at a better fitting abstraction (that is more aligned to the values of capitalism).You can say "doers" are just "craft lovers" in and of itself - there is little distinction between them - this is just reiterating the change from binary to high level languages.
turlockmike: One craft is automated and a new one is just beginning.Building AI agents is really fun and the problem of having them be reliable adaptable efficient is actually really challenging and I'm having a lot of fun with it trying to figure it out.To me it's a lot like factorio or my personal favorite Dyson sphere program where at first you do everything by hand and then you automate and then you automate the automation.For the first time in human history we can automate intelligence with a computer but just because we can automate it doesn't mean all the good automation is good and we need engineers who can figure out how to automate it reliably scale it deploy it maintain it.And yes eventually we will automate the automation too.
bananamogul: I guess there's a quota on HN where every day, some dev has to whinge about how AI is ruining The Way It Used To Be.How is this post different than dozens that have come before it?It's the same gnashing of teeth, just with different analogies each time.
linguae: I’ve come to the same conclusion, though my line of work was research rather than software engineering. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” It’s fun as long as I enjoyed the tunes being called, but the tunes changed, and I became less interested in playing.I am now a tenure-track community college professor. I’m evaluated entirely by my teaching and service. While teaching a full course load is intense, and while my salary is nowhere near what a FAANG engineer makes, I get three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year to rejuvenate and to work on personal projects, with nobody telling me what research projects to work on, how frequently I should publish, and how fast I ship code.This quote from J. J. Thomson resonates with me, and it’s more than 100 years old:"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
wewewedxfgdf: The "it's my craft" developers seem to often disparage the "it's a means to an end" people as not being good at programming.
pclowes: I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.
coliveira: That was the original strategy for universities: teaching was the job, and research was the side-product of having some very smart people with free time. Until some "genius" decided that it was better to have professors competing for money to pay directly for their research. This transformed a noble and desirable profession into just another money searching activity.
burntoutgray: The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.
linguae: My take is that there used to be a significant overlap between hobbyist-style exploration/coding and what industry wanted, especially during the PC revolution where companies like Apple and Microsoft were started by hobbyists selling their creations to other people. This continued through the 1990s and the 2000s; we know the story of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. I am a 90s kid who was inspired by the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to pursue a computing career. I was also inspired by Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers.The “hacker-friendliness” of software industry employment has been eroding in the past decade or so, and generative AI is another factor that strengthens the position of business owners and managers. Perhaps this is the maturing of the software development field. Back when computers were new and when there were few people skilled in computing, employment was more favorable for hobbyists. Over time the frontiers of computing have been settled, which reduced the need for explorers, and thus explorers have been sidelined in favor of different types of workers. LLMs are another step; while I’m not sure that LLMs could do academic research in computer science, they are already capable of doing software engineering tasks that undergraduates and interns could do.I think what some of us are mourning is the closing of a frontier, of our figurative pastures being turned into suburban subdivisions. It’s bigger than generative AI; it’s a field that is less dependent on hobbyists for its future.There will always be other frontiers, and even in computing there are still interesting areas of research and areas where hobbyists can contribute. But I think much of the software industry has moved in a direction where its ethos is different from the ethos of enthusiasts.
raw_anon_1111: Or just shut down your computer after work and “touch grass”. Go to the gym, hang out with friends and family.My “brain” has always been a systems thinker. I was fortunate enough even in my first job to be directly in front of our customer and gathering requirements, not having the label for it then but trying to solve XYProblems, dealing directly with users and their pain points and seeing an entire data entry department built around my code. This was when I was 22 - 3 decades ago.Now my brain helps me go from ambiguous, conflicting requirements, working with people, an empty AWS account and an empty git repo to a complete working solution.Coding has always been the necesary grind between vision and implementation
tracerbulletx: Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.
flankstaek: I think this article misses a potential connection in the capitalist critique of LLMs to correlate this to the equivalent "industrialization" of coding. When a craft becomes industrialized, as is talked about here, you see the divergence in hobbyists and mass production.I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programmers landing jobs and being able to output professional code by crafting it thoughtfully as there wasn't a major output difference previously. Now we are seeing that difference.Food for thought, interesting article!
qsera: Using an LLM for coding is like using a Electric shaver. It is unpredictable and you have to keep going over the same area in hopes that it will pick up the remaining few stubs of hair. Boring, irritating but very convenient.Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
burntoutgray: To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photographers were commissioned to take photos for special events, etc.These days, everybody is an expert photographer, taking thousands of irrelevant photos with their smartphones. The volume of photos has exploded, the quality of the best has minimally changed (i.e. before being photoshopped, etc.)The current crop of AI-aided tools are comparable to the early digital cameras in phones.
4162-123w: These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address:- Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI.- The IP theft that powers the models.- The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low.- The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI.- The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding algorithms and creating beauty.These articles lie by omission, direct your attention to the points they want you to discuss, present false dichotomies and are generally deceptive. If these people win, we are in for a horrible future.
operatingthetan: All of your bullet points look deceptive or dishonest to me. They are either untrue or something that won't stop the march of progress. When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.
RagnarD: I didn't say they were. I feel it too.
smackeyacky: That can go both ways, I’m more make it go and I hate nothing more than debugging somebody else’s over complicated solution but technically fascinating code. In my world boring code is good, maintainable code.
sudo_cowsay: Should we stop protesting the change and just accept it and adapt?
padolsey: I think the one thing missing in the rhetoric around this conversation is how empowering AI has been for people. It is allowing billions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.
Insanity: I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day?People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. That idea is just software and computer geeks (said affectionately) projecting their own desires on a larger community.
d--b: It’s called karma?We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organize and modify them. It’s a bit indecent for a developer to complain that LLMs took away the pleasure of molding a clay made of bits, while the robots we enabled to build took the actual clay off of potmakers actual hands.And what the author forgets to mention is that we got it good. Oh boy. As a software developer, I can work in any field I want. I started on video compression. I moved to finance. I make games in my spare time. I make plugins for music. And I get to be paid way more than my neighbor who’s a heart surgeon. I can work remotely 100%. I can go to a nice beach in Thailand, work 2 hours in the morning and enjoy the rest of the day, and still make more than the median salary in France, where I live.The grief is not the loss of the craft alone, it’s the loss of that craft that paid for your house.As they said: software is eating the world. Well, it is now eating itself. It’s only fair.The author is right though, human societies need to ask themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice all the crafts on the altar of productivity and convenience.The Amish decided they didn’t want to. It’s a bit of a weird choice, but it is a choice.
tytho: Game development is often a completely different set of skills and maintenance profile compared to enterprise SaaS development. Many single-player games especially indie ones don’t need to worry about multi-year contracts or having to work through many cycles of different developers coming in and out of a project. Having a 1000+ line switch statement seems totally reasonable on a project with a handful of developers that will continue to work on the project.My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances.
airbreather: I would suggest that the 1000 line switch statement implies a state machine that has suffered from the "state explosion".This usually results from an inadequate system-subsystem decomposition and/or not considering modes, both of which lead to hierarchal state machines instead of one big flat one.This aspect of architecture is difficult to teach, it is one of the "black arts" that comes from experience and is difficult to codify.Just one example why, is that often it might require the synthesis of state machines not directly evident as needed from the functionality, eg to perform a one to many or many to one functionality.
padolsey: Precisely. I dare say software developers bemoaning this new world don't realise that they - too - are supplanters of a prior world. A sweet irony.
iwontberude: The author conflates two paradigms: The first is one of a child learning BASIC not for beauty but for making things happen on the screen. The second is an adult producing software not because he enjoys the act, challenge and workflow, but for shipping software.I don’t see any difference between the child chasing the beauty of BASIC and the chase to make things happen on the screen. Secondly, there is a very profound difference between a child creating and an adult creating for profit. The profit motive changes everything, even for someone “doing it for the love of it.”
aeon_ai: New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation."IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law.Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use.No matter how you slice it, this technology and capability isn't going away, and that goal post quickly shifts when it's pointed out that "ethically trained" AI gets as much hate as anything else.
Paracompact: Apologies to the user if they aren't an alt and this is just their genuine first post, but: We really ought to delegitimize the whole "creating alts to post unpopular opinions" trend. I know HN is very privacy-centric, but it just seems wrong to me when someone isn't willing to stake their reputation on (what I charitably assume are) genuinely held controversial opinions.
SV_BubbleTime: IDK… I don’t care.I think there is an unheard number of people that think vibe coding is fucking stupid and knows it doesn’t work. While also being really thankful for the small task automation that AI nails every single time.Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Why can’t I just like have a really helpful rubber duck that will find all the missing references or clean up merge issues for me?
shigawire: > Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience?Because the global economy has been wagered on this
padolsey: Does it have to be mutually exclusive? On-the-fly software does not destroy software. Gatekeeping software creation does not mean shoving the existing creators out, it just means creating a larger space that others can occupy, like when 'real' programmers had to slowly permit 'script kiddies' into their spaces. All feels a bit 'old guard' vs 'new guard'.
galangalalgol: That really is a great thing. I do wonder at the segment of the population that from the 70s to today that sculpted their brain to think like a von Neumann machine. What will be lost when the last of us passes. It will likely be viewed as an oddity by future generations and people will try to replicate it as a hobby. But many of us began shortly after learning a primary human language, and that degree of specialization isn't something a hobby can reproduce.
dugite-code: > These days, everybody is an expert photographerIf that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists.I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
airbreather: Just wait long enough
fragmede: Interesting analogy! Not all electric razors are created equal though, some will nick your skin, dull blades will pull out hair painfully. And of course, in this analogy, I'd have to point out laser hair removal. You could use the LLM to build some software to do a thing, or you could have the LLM just do it for you!
martin-t: No, you're the dishonest one. The only bullet point a reasonable person might disagree with it "99.9999%". The rest is true.- Many real devs criticize "AI". Documented: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s?ref=i...- LLMs are trained without respecting the licenses of the original work, not even giving attribution which almost all OSS licenses require. AGPL required derivative works to be also AGPL - this should include the model and all its output for any reasonable meaning of derived work.- SOTA models even today produce absolute garbage. A week ago, Claude Sonnet 4.6 tried to call one constructor from the body of another in C# using syntax which doesn't exist. Less glaring issues are completely normalized. This is why "agentic" generation is so popular today - it puts guard rails around the slop.- I and other devs I've talked to are not interested in the mechanical writing of code but in the additional understanding which comes from engaging deeply with the problem and solution.
chongli: We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek. Maybe to achieve that, a language model builds software entirely autonomously and runs it to carry out the user’s command. Or maybe they want the computer to build them software that they can then use to do their own work more efficiently.
dddgghhbbfblk: I mean I assume it's a bot comment. It has that LLM stink to it in writing style even without the "new account" signal.
airbreather: All the whingers about AI - if it is as bad as you say, then you don't have a problemOn the other hand, if it is not, then stop wasting effort arguing against the inevitable and use that effort to get ahead of the curve.Either way, whinging about it is the least effective use of your skills and time.
Insanity: Not mutually exclusive, but I thought your initial post painted an overly rosy picture with the sentence "[..] allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years".I don't think it's happening at this scale. I'll admit I have no real data to back that up, it's just a hunch really. But I find it hard to believe that those people whom previously weren't interested in building software are now suddenly interested to build stuff with an LLM. I'm sure _some_ people are doing this, and then they either hit roadblocks and quit or stick with it an learn actual software engineering.Looking at my non-tech bubble of friends and family, I don't see anyone actually doing that. I think it's a vocal minority that is doing this. That's just anecdata of course.
