> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.

That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.

The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.

I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.

I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.

The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.

In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?

I don't think that fully captures the situation.

My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes.

However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so.

I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

Someone once told me

"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."

People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.

There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".

But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.

Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks.

Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?

It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.

I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...

What I do for work, isn't the same as what I do for fun.

I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure.

At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context.

So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely.

There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out.

So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.

The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse.

Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.

> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?

I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.

Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.

If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.

Honestly, enjoying the craft hasn’t resulted in a career related to it. My real job and chores take up most of my capacity, leaving little to enjoy the craft. But now with AI, I can play with crafting as if it was a video game. The end results, which nowhere near is satisfying, is better than nothing. Coding with AI feels gamified and simulated, but still somehow creates useful outcomes.

I did. I did think I enjoyed the craft.

Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.

A good question.

A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.

One thing to note is that as soon as Suno figured out hiphop artists were making $150,000 a year spewing AI songs onto Spotify, they imposed a 60 song per month download limit to stop that.

It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.

Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.

If programming was used to temporarily increase one's self esteem from it then it's not a problem with the IAs, but a psychological problem. The problem is valuing a human being because of what they produce and not recognizing intrinsic value. The same situation could have happened in a different profession when automation replaced it, it's not about IA.

Yep, calculator, etc.

A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI.

Share anecdotes and examples if you have any

We all have intrinsic value being threatened by these systems and technologists (particularly systems/software engineers and programmers) have a responsibility to build systems to help humans meet their everyday needs without or with minimal oppression (only as a stepping stone to full removal/prevention).

Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies.

Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.

> I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch

I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.

Fack, hopefully it's better than Ikea vs carpenter or most people will need new jobs because most "customers" are just buying Ikea all day.

There is an old saying in creative fields, long before AI: you can make art, or you can make money. It's rare that you can combine the two.

Of course most creators actually enjoy craft, do enjoy compliments and find them motivating ... and need money and want money.

There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.

Regarding programming, I would say my answer would be yes to all of your questions. I think all of those feelings and pleasures can exist simultaneously.

Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined.

I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.

  Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?

  Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?

  Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?

  it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?

*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.

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I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out.

On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft.

Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do.

They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.