alt Hacker NewsThe '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.
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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.
Would you say mechanics, repairmen, and other trade workers are more valuable today? They have become rarer yes, and everyone thinks they must be making bank off their rarer skill set, and yet the actual wages those skilled people receive haven't gone up.
Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill.
How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments.
When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it.
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.