The blacksmith analogy is poetic but misleading. Blacksmithing was replaced by a process that needed no blacksmith at all. What's happening with code is closer to what synthesizers did to music — the instrument changed, the craft didn't die.

Musicians mourned synthesizers. Illustrators mourned Photoshop. Typesetters mourned desktop publishing. In every case the people who thrived weren't the ones who refused the new tool or the ones who blindly adopted it. They were the ones who understood that the tool absorbed the mechanical layer while the taste layer became more valuable, not less.

The real shift isn't from hand-coding to AI-coding. It's from "I express intent through syntax" to "I express intent through constraints and review." That's still judgment. Still craft. Just a different substrate.

What we're actually mourning is the loss of effort as a signal of quality. When anyone can generate working code, the differentiator moves upstream to architecture, to knowing what to build, to understanding why one approach fails at scale and another doesn't. Those are harder skills, not easier ones.