alt Hacker NewsBecause there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood. Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus. Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
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One of my favorite Youtube channels, Mighty Car Mods, had a video a while back where they chose to use all hand tools for one of their car build projects instead of power tools.
For guys like those you can't really make an argument that they don't care about the craft when they use power tools 90% of the time normally.
So are LLMs a short cut? sure. Does that mean people using them don't care about the craft? not necessarily.
I'd love to spend more time actually learning iOS development. It's just that I work in a different area for my regular job and when I get home I don't have the time (due to various responsibilities) to sit down and spend adequate time on iOS.
You're not the carpenter though, the code you wrote can rarely do things on its own, you need a toolchain or an interpreter, or something to run it with. Toolchains use your code as rough reference, turning you into a designer/architect. I don't endorse it when people fully offload development to LLMs, that's lazy and irresponsible, but how I see most devs use it (not the loud minority) it's just another tool in the arsenal. If it lets you skip the annoying steps and focus on the logic - excellent, great, I'm not great at Java, i don't know all of its built in APIs, I can ask an LLM that I need this and this API to communicate with C++ layer, perform the following logic, output the following logs, after which I can audit and validate the code to the best of my ability. Is that such a bad thing? Did a caveman with a stick reject the hammer and the axe?
Disingenuous analogy, because you're taking the work of a carpenter and then jumping all the way to a Star Trek style replicator, which is daft.
The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.
Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.
Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.
I think it depends on what you mean by "the craft".
I understand the sentiments, genuinely. I do miss the feelings of carefully crafting a great piece of code. There was a genuine sense of accomplishment there. I still get a sense of accomplishment from agentic development, but it's different. It feels more similar to when you've steered a team of people who are actually doing the work, and then the final product gets delivered. I never touched the actual work, but my input / steering / taste / direction / etc. was a big part of what was delivered. And now we have the solution that we wanted.
If you got into this field because you like to hand-write code, and that's what you view as your craft, then yeah, I think you probably are in a tough spot. There's always the opportunity to do that on your own time, just like I'm sure the vast majority of woodworkers today are doing it for fun, not as their profession.
But if you're in this field because you have a passion for building things that solve problems (you know, engineering), if that's what you view as your craft, I don't think there's any shortage of opportunities to practice your craft.
Why are carpenters always the example in these arguments? I know a framing carpenter and I've never heard anyone whine more about their job than he does.