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.