Grief and the AI split

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... :

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

After years of working at startups I’ve long since abandoned any notion of craft at work. I have developed a very keen sense for harmfully cutting corners though, and unreviewed AI code (or unreasonably large PRs - defined by a size you can’t comfortably review) is absolutely cutting corners. It’s nothing to do with craft and everything to do with both correctness and incurring massive amounts of future debt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

This reminds me of the divide between Role-players and Number-chasers in the once-upon-a-time MUD players communities.

>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.

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?

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.

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.

I just do not want to deal with other people's AI-generated code.

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..

Author doesn't care about their blog writing as craft, either (it's been fed through an LLM.)

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Yow, submitter sure isn't shy with their bias. Maybe defang the title?

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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

Strong agree. Needs another pass or two at editing though, some painful LLM-os sticking out there :'(