alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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You are building a system that has a shaky mental model and which may or may not adhere to the *.md files.
Came here to say something similar. For me, the craft aspect is now even more exciting because I can craft more ambitious things without getting bogged down in the details. For me, refining my conceptual model, drawing diagrams, finding the right way to think about something was the craft.
Maybe that's another way of saying: I was trained as a designer, and now the distinction between design (read: architecture, service-design, product, ux, cx) and programming is blurring.
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...)