To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photographers were commissioned to take photos for special events, etc.
These days, everybody is an expert photographer, taking thousands of irrelevant photos with their smartphones. The volume of photos has exploded, the quality of the best has minimally changed (i.e. before being photoshopped, etc.)
The current crop of AI-aided tools are comparable to the early digital cameras in phones.
No, everybody is a photographer, and a mediocre one at that. That's the point.
AI won't turn laypeople into expert programmers. Mediocrity might be just enough for the problem they need to solve, but quality and craftsmanship comes from dedication and hard work, not one-click solutions.
If that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists.
I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
An excellent analogy. Everyone is an expert in taking the photo. But this does not make them a photographer. Even that expert claim is actually not fully true, the phone camera is woefully inadequate in many ways. But the main difference between a photographer and a layman like myself is the ability to produce output strongly linked with clear artistic intent.
Writing code is not the hard part and never has been. The hard part is having a clear understanding of how to solve a specific complex problem and being able to express that intent in code. Getting a decently exposed image was never the hard part.
Finally, there’s no scaling issues with cameras. You just make them better until it stops making economic sense. This is not true with code. To make llms better, good human-made code is needed for training. Better llms lead to less human-made code being available. This means there’s not an exponential growth in quality but a S-curve with a balance point. I’d say we are already there: innovation is shifting from the models to the ways of harnessing the models.
And you could say similar for the transition between painting and photography.
ETA: It's interesting how the bottleneck may reveal the real skill in the thing. Architecting the code. Having a eye for interestingness in creating an image / painting of something, etc.
The '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.
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.
Game development is often a completely different set of skills and maintenance profile compared to enterprise SaaS development. Many single-player games especially indie ones don’t need to worry about multi-year contracts or having to work through many cycles of different developers coming in and out of a project. Having a 1000+ line switch statement seems totally reasonable on a project with a handful of developers that will continue to work on the project.
My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances.
I would suggest that the 1000 line switch statement implies a state machine that has suffered from the "state explosion".
This usually results from an inadequate system-subsystem decomposition and/or not considering modes, both of which lead to hierarchal state machines instead of one big flat one.
This aspect of architecture is difficult to teach, it is one of the "black arts" that comes from experience and is difficult to codify.
Just one example why, is that often it might require the synthesis of state machines not directly evident as needed from the functionality, eg to perform a one to many or many to one functionality.
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.
What I fear is that early or even current steps of this process is replacing parts of the code or all code wholesale. With as broken or just slightly less broken code. Albeit the way it is broken could be different each time. So problems are not fixed, they are just replaced with different problems. Ad nauseum...
And like SEO blog spam it’s just going to grow in volume because people want to pad their CV’s with all sorts of activity in GitHub regardless of the quality
I've been feeling the craft side of this for the last few years. My education is in Fine Art and I am a self taught UI developer. To me this was a craft of making the code do what the designer envisioned and working with creatives to create engaging and unique interfaces. Slowly but surely "standardization" eroded this via bootstrap and material UI and interfaces lost that spark of creativity. This was the beginning of thinking of sites as products in my mind. LLMs are just the nail in this coffin. Since tools like Claude Code and Cursor have entered the market, I don't do tech in my free time anymore. I don't enjoy it now. I just use the LLM at work like the business dictates (and monitors) then clock out promptly at 5:00.
There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.
I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day?
People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. That idea is just software and computer geeks (said affectionately) projecting their own desires on a larger community.
Does it have to be mutually exclusive? On-the-fly software does not destroy software. Gatekeeping software creation does not mean shoving the existing creators out, it just means creating a larger space that others can occupy, like when 'real' programmers had to slowly permit 'script kiddies' into their spaces. All feels a bit 'old guard' vs 'new guard'.
Not mutually exclusive, but I thought your initial post painted an overly rosy picture with the sentence "[..] allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years".
I don't think it's happening at this scale. I'll admit I have no real data to back that up, it's just a hunch really. But I find it hard to believe that those people whom previously weren't interested in building software are now suddenly interested to build stuff with an LLM. I'm sure _some_ people are doing this, and then they either hit roadblocks and quit or stick with it an learn actual software engineering.
Looking at my non-tech bubble of friends and family, I don't see anyone actually doing that. I think it's a vocal minority that is doing this. That's just anecdata of course.
I think using GPT et.al. to create a bespoke tool to do what you need is giving the average home user too much credit. What I see more of is just using the prompt in the place of software to create an outcome. "Transcribe this recording", "give me a synopsis of the Godfather films", "How can I wow my girlfriend?". The fraction of home users who are using this to create software is likely highly limited to people with no skills trying to make apps to sell, which is not a tool to help them with something else. Even the software devs I know are using tools made for them, not making their own Claude Code or Cursor.
Right now, the greenfield is in how you use these tools. Making a bespoke specialized tool for yourself, or automating onboarding or CICD setups with simple commands or building bridges between "gatekept" existing software and agents are ripe for growth.
I get that we should see this as a good thing, but I see it as entering the last act of a play. Thousands of people are doing these things and coming up with uses for the tools around the clock. Novel uses for the technology will all be exhausted in the next couple of years and there will be less room for innovation than there was before LLMs.
We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek. Maybe to achieve that, a language model builds software entirely autonomously and runs it to carry out the user’s command. Or maybe they want the computer to build them software that they can then use to do their own work more efficiently.
> We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek.
Since you brought up Star Trek, a good analogue for AI would be the holodeck. Given the appropriate prompts, it produces amazing scenery and even immersive fantasy narratives.
But occasionally, it goes haywire, the safeties no longer work, and the characters from your fictional adventure try to kill you.
That really is a great thing. I do wonder at the segment of the population that from the 70s to today that sculpted their brain to think like a von Neumann machine. What will be lost when the last of us passes. It will likely be viewed as an oddity by future generations and people will try to replicate it as a hobby. But many of us began shortly after learning a primary human language, and that degree of specialization isn't something a hobby can reproduce.
I don't even know what this means. Were programming languages and compilers unavailable? I think this overstates the predicament that users were in quite a lot. In fact, I don't think any users even asked or wanted this really other than maybe very simple musings of wanting to say "computer, enhance" or something like that. I'm not sure how vibe-coding has now given the average user something that they know will not have their hands tied behind their backs. Most users will never vibecode anything and most of the non-technical people that will, will try it once or twice as a novelty or an attempt to solve a problem and then give up.
Now, what you might end up doing is removing the need for them to even have a computer to begin with. Someone without a job doesn't need business productivity software that much.
I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.
It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.
I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.
For me, woodworking has never been about the "craft". It's been about holding that finished product in my hand. That's why I gave up manual woodworking and shifted to ordering finished pieces from IKEA. The speed with which I can now receive furniture delivered to my door far outpaces anything I could have ever done myself.
Some people say this isn't actually woodworking — that it's just ordering stuff online — but they don't see the hours I put into selecting colors and choosing modular pieces that fit together perfectly for my space.
The future of woodworking is here, and most woodworkers aren't ready.
Same, I'm a painter, and these days I just order prints online. For me it's was always about seeing a beautiful painting before my eyes.
Some people say this isn't actually painting, but they don't see the hours and impeccable taste of mine involved in browsing the works of Canaletto and Botticelli.
What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand
One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
I’ve come to the same conclusion, though my line of work was research rather than software engineering. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” It’s fun as long as I enjoyed the tunes being called, but the tunes changed, and I became less interested in playing.
I am now a tenure-track community college professor. I’m evaluated entirely by my teaching and service. While teaching a full course load is intense, and while my salary is nowhere near what a FAANG engineer makes, I get three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year to rejuvenate and to work on personal projects, with nobody telling me what research projects to work on, how frequently I should publish, and how fast I ship code.
This quote from J. J. Thomson resonates with me, and it’s more than 100 years old:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
That was the original strategy for universities: teaching was the job, and research was the side-product of having some very smart people with free time. Until some "genius" decided that it was better to have professors competing for money to pay directly for their research. This transformed a noble and desirable profession into just another money searching activity.
Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.
I wholeheartedly agree. Computing professions such as software engineering used to feel like, "Wow, they're paying me to do this!" Yes, there was real work involved, but for many of us it never felt like drudgery, and we produced, shipped, and made our customers, managers, and other stakeholders happy. I remember a time (roughly 20 years ago) when zealous enthusiasts would proudly profess that they'd work for companies like Apple or Google for free if they could work on their dream projects.
Times have changed. The field has become much more serious about making money; fantasies about volunteering at Apple have been replaced with fantasies about very large salaries and RSU grants. Simultaneously (and I don't think coincidentally), the field has become less fun. I recognized how privileged this sounds talking about "fun", given how for most of humanity, work isn't about having fun and personal fulfillment, but about making the money required to house, feed, and clothe themselves and their loved ones. Even with the drudgery of corporate life, it beats the work conditions and the abuse that many other occupations get.
Still, let's pour one out for a time when the interests and passions of computing enthusiasts did line up with the interests of the corporate world.
Or just shut down your computer after work and “touch grass”. Go to the gym, hang out with friends and family.
My “brain” has always been a systems thinker. I was fortunate enough even in my first job to be directly in front of our customer and gathering requirements, not having the label for it then but trying to solve XYProblems, dealing directly with users and their pain points and seeing an entire data entry department built around my code. This was when I was 22 - 3 decades ago.
Now my brain helps me go from ambiguous, conflicting requirements, working with people, an empty AWS account and an empty git repo to a complete working solution.
Coding has always been the necesary grind between vision and implementation
Using an LLM for coding is like using a Electric shaver. It is unpredictable and you have to keep going over the same area in hopes that it will pick up the remaining few stubs of hair. Boring, irritating but very convenient.
Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
Interesting analogy! Not all electric razors are created equal though, some will nick your skin, dull blades will pull out hair painfully. And of course, in this analogy, I'd have to point out laser hair removal. You could use the LLM to build some software to do a thing, or you could have the LLM just do it for you!
i think anyone who feels dispossessed from the advance of technology should rekindle that spirit of hands-on adventure by looking at clay pots at the museum.
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
I think this article misses a potential connection in the capitalist critique of LLMs to correlate this to the equivalent "industrialization" of coding. When a craft becomes industrialized, as is talked about here, you see the divergence in hobbyists and mass production.
I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programmers landing jobs and being able to output professional code by crafting it thoughtfully as there wasn't a major output difference previously. Now we are seeing that difference.
Absolutely. These tools are being used to deprofessionalize our work. At some point, perhaps in our lifetime, most of us will no longer be able to bring anything to the table that commands either job security or a good wage. This is the dream of most of the employing class. There will be a glut of laid off software engineers all jockeying for positions babysitting a dozen LLM agents at a time, agents that work constantly and never run out of questions and review requests to ping us with. Perhaps we'll be measured on our response time to agent inquiries. Just like all the cottage weavers who ended up stuck in a thunderously loud power loom weaving shed for 14 hours a day, we are going to discover what a big loss in status and security feels like.
Any special knowledge, taste, or communication skills we think we are bringing to the table will be siphoned into LLMs and used to train them. The way we boss the LLM around to make it produce better work will be incorporated into the next model version, rendering our contributions less and less valuable. Companies will make deals with LLM providers to suck all their internal customer interactions and team chats into the LLM so they can tune it to replicate those interactions. Perhaps it will go off the rails now and then, but think of the savings.
There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps.
I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if `a = 1` after setting a to 1.
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
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.
I think this is a bit facetious. Although software had a bunch of localized impacts, it killed only a handful of mainstream professions. People still had to typeset articles, there was just less lead involved. For a writer, switching from a typewriter to a keyboard didn't mean you somehow needed less skill to write.
That said, I'm with you that it's tacky for software engineers to complain about their own hardships. We are some of the wealthiest and most pampered white collar workers out there, and we're not exactly innocent bystanders.
I wrote a comment on this thread. After reading yours I upvoted it and deleted mine: you clearly gave it more thought than I did and expressed my sentiment a lot clearer.
I don’t think this split is fundamental or permanent.
Look at photography.
You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.
And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.
That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.
That can go both ways, I’m more make it go and I hate nothing more than debugging somebody else’s over complicated solution but technically fascinating code. In my world boring code is good, maintainable code.
These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address:
- Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI.
- The IP theft that powers the models.
- The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low.
- The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI.
- The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding algorithms and creating beauty.
These articles lie by omission, direct your attention to the points they want you to discuss, present false dichotomies and are generally deceptive. If these people win, we are in for a horrible future.
I think there is an unheard number of people that think vibe coding is fucking stupid and knows it doesn’t work. While also being really thankful for the small task automation that AI nails every single time.
Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Why can’t I just like have a really helpful rubber duck that will find all the missing references or clean up merge issues for me?
Is that what they're wagering on though? Everytime I open X, it's all about the first to some hand-wavy definition of AGI is going to win everything, and it's the only thing that can get us through the painful transition period from massive job loss to abundance.
The cost of growing and running large LLMs far exceeds the economic value of small task automation.
Small, targeted, on-device, cheap to run models make sense in some places. General purpose LLMs that take many gigawatt data centers to lose money producing questionable output don't.
We are finding ourselves simultaneously trying to divest from fossil fuels while increasing our energy consumption faster than ever. What are we getting for it? Slop, sycophantic rubber ducks, and merge conflict Clippy.
> Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience?
Because of the amount of money riding on it to be a life/world-altering experience. A really helpful rubber duck is not worth the cost. The dreams of AGI is. This is from a stock market pov not dev, but market narratives dominate in the mainstream, not tech.
New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation.
"IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law.
Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use.
No matter how you slice it, this technology and capability isn't going away, and that goal post quickly shifts when it's pointed out that "ethically trained" AI gets as much hate as anything else.
Whats wrong with the original luddites that you would try and use them to disparage modern worker rights advocates? They were right. Automation did reduce their quality of life and destroy their wages, and it is only through the luddites and other worker rights organizations making their demands unignorable that gave workers more modern and fair standards like 40 hour weeks, vacations, safety regulations, and unions.
You know who built the looms that the luddites later broke? The luddites themselves. They were the one building automated looms under promises that they would make more money and have cheaper fabric. Instead what they got was towns suffering in poverty under garbage wages, shitty working conditions with longer hours, and worse quality fabric as the corporate looms penny pinched their fibre and fabric more and more.
If the benefits of automated looms were actually shared with the luddites to start with, maybe their society wouldn't have gone down the toilet and they wouldn't have been so pissed. And today corporations are far more powerful than the capitalists back in the luddite days, both monetarily and legally.
It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which gives them more ownership and is heritable.
BTW, I am really happy whenever I see another person who knows who the luddites really were. The rest are condemned to repeat this shit and we're all worse off because of them.
You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?
Co-op businesses seem to not have a problem sharing the profits on less tangible products and services. So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative".
> So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.
This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.
It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.
No, the mechanism is clear. What I don't understand is your use of the word fallacy. It is not a fallacy, it is the reality. Being an employee is not an ideal. It is the lived reality for most people.
I've has similar discussions multiple times. Each time it boils down to one of these arguments:
a) "You're not forced to do it, you chose it so it's consensual and therefore right."
b) "The value of your work is determined by how much you managed to negotiate."
The issue with a) is that consent has to be informed and between parties with similar bargaining power, neither is true in an employer-employee relationship. Also choice from a limited set of options where some have large artificial upfront costs is not the same as 100% voluntary free choice.
The issue with b) is that the product (both the output sold to customers and the organization producing the output which can be sold by the owners) have value. This value is independent of the negotiated compensation for work.
Hence, arguments ignoring these issues are fallacious.
Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential.
Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy companies and get passive income.
Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]
I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.
[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.
[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.
[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.
They get ownership. The rest is determined from that, since owners collectively decide how much everyone gets paid.
(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)
See my other comment. As long as the cleaner cannot fire the CEO, but only the other way around, ownership doesn't mean anything. If you own 0.00001 percent of a company, that gives you about as much power as your vote in a democracy. Probably less so.
Why should the collective owners even have a CEO and why should he have the power to fire people? The only way would be if they collectively decided that. There are other ways to structure the company.
> 0.00001
That's a lot of zeros, must be a huge company and/or a very low skill short-time worker. And a small country if one vote is worth more than that.
Yes, I like my cleaner example. It will be a lot of zeros. Yes, let's end this discussion, I think your views are quite naive and not well thought out.
BTW the company is part of the product. If certain work needs to be done, even if it's low-skill work, it contributes to the function of that company and should give fractional ownership according to amount worked and some coefficient accounting for relative skill.
Who decides who gets hired and fired at that company? How is the coefficient determined? Are we talking about amount of work, or how much your work has contributed to the bottom line of the company?
I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.
Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation
And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.
> Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
As the cleaner you don't have the same leverage as the CEO. There would be no change in leverage at all. That's what you don't seem to understand.
As the cleaner, the only leverage would be that you don't need a job. And if you have that kind of leverage, why would you clean at all?
I am all ears for a new system that could actually work, but I don't think it will come from you. You don't seem to be willing to actually think through things.
Hierarchical top-down power structures are only useful when you need to make decisions fast. Pretty much all other times, you can have a vote. As such, I don't see why an individual ("CEO") should have the power to fire workers (or why he should even exist outside emergencies and only have powers needed to avert those emergencies).
Generally, on a team, people know who does good work and who works poorly and drags others or the whole team down. Given that, I can see hiring/firing decisions being made at the team level. If a whole team is seen as underperforming/redundant within the organization as a whole, then the team should be given the choice of either making itself leaner or severing cooperation with the rest of the company. This is still hierarchical but bottom up.
Regarding your last sentence and your general attitude, I think I'll sever our communication here.
Apologies to the user if they aren't an alt and this is just their genuine first post, but: We really ought to delegitimize the whole "creating alts to post unpopular opinions" trend. I know HN is very privacy-centric, but it just seems wrong to me when someone isn't willing to stake their reputation on (what I charitably assume are) genuinely held controversial opinions.
That's kind of the point - encouraging people to post genuine thoughts that they otherwise wouldn't because of the fear that they might suffer for it later. Sure, it doesn't always encourage the most well thought-out comments, but raising the bar for new commenters with no/low reputation is how you end up with echo chambers.
I think the policy is there for a reason. I think it encourages more free discussion. I don't know if you are upset that there is a way for people to express thoughtful ideas without being bullied for doing wrongthink or havingt he wrong opinions.
IP was the wrong tool for code from the start, it was just convenient to use because it already existed.
What should be protected is human work (it and natural resources are the only things to which humanity ascribes inherent value, all other value is built on top of those).
LLMs are trained on millions of lifetimes of human work while all the income from them goes to the rich at the top. If you don't see an issue with this, not only do you not care about fairness and justice, you also haven't even gamed out in your head what happens 5 or maybe 15 years down the line.
All of your bullet points look deceptive or dishonest to me. They are either untrue or something that won't stop the march of progress. When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.
> When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.
I feel it's possibly pertinent to point out that cars didn't use existing horses or bicycles as fuel/building materials/<some other analogy here>, whereas LLMs ingest the software people have written previously during their creation.
- LLMs are trained without respecting the licenses of the original work, not even giving attribution which almost all OSS licenses require. AGPL required derivative works to be also AGPL - this should include the model and all its output for any reasonable meaning of derived work.
- SOTA models even today produce absolute garbage. A week ago, Claude Sonnet 4.6 tried to call one constructor from the body of another in C# using syntax which doesn't exist. Less glaring issues are completely normalized. This is why "agentic" generation is so popular today - it puts guard rails around the slop.
- I and other devs I've talked to are not interested in the mechanical writing of code but in the additional understanding which comes from engaging deeply with the problem and solution.
It's not about stopping progress, it's about 1) making sure the progress is in the right direction 2) rewarding the people who actually made the progress possible instead of those who have capital.
But of course, feel free to just join the winning side. But then if you don't stand up against injustice today, I won't stand up against it tomorrow when it's happening to you.
This is probably contrary to conventional wisdom (esp among the startup/VC crowd) but: there are very few scenarios where how quickly you build something matters more than the quality of what you build.
The AI coding era has brought about an unhealthy obsession with speed of software dev (where "speed" is often measured by fallacious metrics like LOC pushed per day, but that's tangential). And it's obvious why, this is the main commercial value proposition (if you can build 2x faster, you need 50% as many devs).
Except that the speed only comes "for free" until a certain point. Beyond that point, you're trading off quality for more speed, and this trade is almost never worth it. If it takes you 6 months to handcraft a high quality version of your product (with selective AI assistance only until the boundary where it's not eating quality), almost always this is a better approach than banging out some heavily vibe/agent-coded crap in 1 month.
I guess I’m not the target audience but the flood of articles about craft or “deep blue” feel like a psyop.
When the middle class disappears and your comfortable salary is replaced by, at best, a $1000/mo UBI (that’s 12k per year by the way) most people won’t have time to think or care about this nonsense
Craft is caring about the x in y = mx + b, while the so called "it's a means to an end" care about the y.
The difference between "craft lovers" and "doers" is that one operates at a better fitting abstraction (that is more aligned to the values of capitalism).
You can say "doers" are just "craft lovers" in and of itself - there is little distinction between them - this is just reiterating the change from binary to high level languages.
> Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
I do not agree with this assertion and I don't know why I don't see more pushback against it, neither here nor in the comments for the original post.
If you're a "craft-lover" sitting next to and working with a "make-it-go person", odds are you will be very much aware of it. Even non-technical leadership is likely to be able to notice it if they're perceptive enough.
The author conflates two paradigms:
The first is one of a child learning BASIC not for beauty but for making things happen on the screen.
The second is an adult producing software not because he enjoys the act, challenge and workflow, but for shipping software.
I don’t see any difference between the child learning BASIC for its beauty and the chase to make things happen on the screen. Secondly, there is a very profound difference between a child creating and an adult creating for profit. The profit motive changes everything, even for someone “doing it for the love of it.”
I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.
My take is that there used to be a significant overlap between hobbyist-style exploration/coding and what industry wanted, especially during the PC revolution where companies like Apple and Microsoft were started by hobbyists selling their creations to other people. This continued through the 1990s and the 2000s; we know the story of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. I am a 90s kid who was inspired by the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to pursue a computing career. I was also inspired by Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers.
The “hacker-friendliness” of software industry employment has been eroding in the past decade or so, and generative AI is another factor that strengthens the position of business owners and managers. Perhaps this is the maturing of the software development field. Back when computers were new and when there were few people skilled in computing, employment was more favorable for hobbyists. Over time the frontiers of computing have been settled, which reduced the need for explorers, and thus explorers have been sidelined in favor of different types of workers. LLMs are another step; while I’m not sure that LLMs could do academic research in computer science, they are already capable of doing software engineering tasks that undergraduates and interns could do.
I think what some of us are mourning is the closing of a frontier, of our figurative pastures being turned into suburban subdivisions. It’s bigger than generative AI; it’s a field that is less dependent on hobbyists for its future.
There will always be other frontiers, and even in computing there are still interesting areas of research and areas where hobbyists can contribute. But I think much of the software industry has moved in a direction where its ethos is different from the ethos of enthusiasts.
If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.
One craft is automated and a new one is just beginning.
Building AI agents is really fun and the problem of having them be reliable adaptable efficient is actually really challenging and I'm having a lot of fun with it trying to figure it out.
To me it's a lot like factorio or my personal favorite Dyson sphere program where at first you do everything by hand and then you automate and then you automate the automation.
For the first time in human history we can automate intelligence with a computer but just because we can automate it doesn't mean all the good automation is good and we need engineers who can figure out how to automate it reliably scale it deploy it maintain it.
And yes eventually we will automate the automation too.
To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photographers were commissioned to take photos for special events, etc.
These days, everybody is an expert photographer, taking thousands of irrelevant photos with their smartphones. The volume of photos has exploded, the quality of the best has minimally changed (i.e. before being photoshopped, etc.)
The current crop of AI-aided tools are comparable to the early digital cameras in phones.
> These days, everybody is an expert photographer
No, everybody is a photographer, and a mediocre one at that. That's the point.
AI won't turn laypeople into expert programmers. Mediocrity might be just enough for the problem they need to solve, but quality and craftsmanship comes from dedication and hard work, not one-click solutions.
> These days, everybody is an expert photographer
If that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists.
I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
This fails to take into account a pervasive, global lowering of standards on all fronts.
Who will retain the good taste to keep paying a premium for professional photographers, etc?
We shot our wedding (2021) entirely on film. Some medium format, some 35mm, some instant film (polaroid and instax mini)
Just wait long enough
An excellent analogy. Everyone is an expert in taking the photo. But this does not make them a photographer. Even that expert claim is actually not fully true, the phone camera is woefully inadequate in many ways. But the main difference between a photographer and a layman like myself is the ability to produce output strongly linked with clear artistic intent.
Writing code is not the hard part and never has been. The hard part is having a clear understanding of how to solve a specific complex problem and being able to express that intent in code. Getting a decently exposed image was never the hard part.
Finally, there’s no scaling issues with cameras. You just make them better until it stops making economic sense. This is not true with code. To make llms better, good human-made code is needed for training. Better llms lead to less human-made code being available. This means there’s not an exponential growth in quality but a S-curve with a balance point. I’d say we are already there: innovation is shifting from the models to the ways of harnessing the models.
And you could say similar for the transition between painting and photography.
ETA: It's interesting how the bottleneck may reveal the real skill in the thing. Architecting the code. Having a eye for interestingness in creating an image / painting of something, etc.
The '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.
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.
This is why “worse is better” always wins eventually.
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.
Game development is often a completely different set of skills and maintenance profile compared to enterprise SaaS development. Many single-player games especially indie ones don’t need to worry about multi-year contracts or having to work through many cycles of different developers coming in and out of a project. Having a 1000+ line switch statement seems totally reasonable on a project with a handful of developers that will continue to work on the project.
My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances.
I would suggest that the 1000 line switch statement implies a state machine that has suffered from the "state explosion".
This usually results from an inadequate system-subsystem decomposition and/or not considering modes, both of which lead to hierarchal state machines instead of one big flat one.
This aspect of architecture is difficult to teach, it is one of the "black arts" that comes from experience and is difficult to codify.
Just one example why, is that often it might require the synthesis of state machines not directly evident as needed from the functionality, eg to perform a one to many or many to one functionality.
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.
What I fear is that early or even current steps of this process is replacing parts of the code or all code wholesale. With as broken or just slightly less broken code. Albeit the way it is broken could be different each time. So problems are not fixed, they are just replaced with different problems. Ad nauseum...
This is the pattern. The labor is nearly worthless, so just have the bot reinvent the wheel every time.
"Single-use applications" but instead of a bash script, it's a 250k lines monstrosity in Rust because "static typing"
And like SEO blog spam it’s just going to grow in volume because people want to pad their CV’s with all sorts of activity in GitHub regardless of the quality
I've been feeling the craft side of this for the last few years. My education is in Fine Art and I am a self taught UI developer. To me this was a craft of making the code do what the designer envisioned and working with creatives to create engaging and unique interfaces. Slowly but surely "standardization" eroded this via bootstrap and material UI and interfaces lost that spark of creativity. This was the beginning of thinking of sites as products in my mind. LLMs are just the nail in this coffin. Since tools like Claude Code and Cursor have entered the market, I don't do tech in my free time anymore. I don't enjoy it now. I just use the LLM at work like the business dictates (and monitors) then clock out promptly at 5:00.
There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.
I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day?
People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. That idea is just software and computer geeks (said affectionately) projecting their own desires on a larger community.
Does it have to be mutually exclusive? On-the-fly software does not destroy software. Gatekeeping software creation does not mean shoving the existing creators out, it just means creating a larger space that others can occupy, like when 'real' programmers had to slowly permit 'script kiddies' into their spaces. All feels a bit 'old guard' vs 'new guard'.
Not mutually exclusive, but I thought your initial post painted an overly rosy picture with the sentence "[..] allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years".
I don't think it's happening at this scale. I'll admit I have no real data to back that up, it's just a hunch really. But I find it hard to believe that those people whom previously weren't interested in building software are now suddenly interested to build stuff with an LLM. I'm sure _some_ people are doing this, and then they either hit roadblocks and quit or stick with it an learn actual software engineering.
Looking at my non-tech bubble of friends and family, I don't see anyone actually doing that. I think it's a vocal minority that is doing this. That's just anecdata of course.
I think using GPT et.al. to create a bespoke tool to do what you need is giving the average home user too much credit. What I see more of is just using the prompt in the place of software to create an outcome. "Transcribe this recording", "give me a synopsis of the Godfather films", "How can I wow my girlfriend?". The fraction of home users who are using this to create software is likely highly limited to people with no skills trying to make apps to sell, which is not a tool to help them with something else. Even the software devs I know are using tools made for them, not making their own Claude Code or Cursor.
Right now, the greenfield is in how you use these tools. Making a bespoke specialized tool for yourself, or automating onboarding or CICD setups with simple commands or building bridges between "gatekept" existing software and agents are ripe for growth.
I get that we should see this as a good thing, but I see it as entering the last act of a play. Thousands of people are doing these things and coming up with uses for the tools around the clock. Novel uses for the technology will all be exhausted in the next couple of years and there will be less room for innovation than there was before LLMs.
We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek. Maybe to achieve that, a language model builds software entirely autonomously and runs it to carry out the user’s command. Or maybe they want the computer to build them software that they can then use to do their own work more efficiently.
> We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek.
Since you brought up Star Trek, a good analogue for AI would be the holodeck. Given the appropriate prompts, it produces amazing scenery and even immersive fantasy narratives.
But occasionally, it goes haywire, the safeties no longer work, and the characters from your fictional adventure try to kill you.
That really is a great thing. I do wonder at the segment of the population that from the 70s to today that sculpted their brain to think like a von Neumann machine. What will be lost when the last of us passes. It will likely be viewed as an oddity by future generations and people will try to replicate it as a hobby. But many of us began shortly after learning a primary human language, and that degree of specialization isn't something a hobby can reproduce.
I don't even know what this means. Were programming languages and compilers unavailable? I think this overstates the predicament that users were in quite a lot. In fact, I don't think any users even asked or wanted this really other than maybe very simple musings of wanting to say "computer, enhance" or something like that. I'm not sure how vibe-coding has now given the average user something that they know will not have their hands tied behind their backs. Most users will never vibecode anything and most of the non-technical people that will, will try it once or twice as a novelty or an attempt to solve a problem and then give up.
Now, what you might end up doing is removing the need for them to even have a computer to begin with. Someone without a job doesn't need business productivity software that much.
I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.
It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.
I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.
For me, woodworking has never been about the "craft". It's been about holding that finished product in my hand. That's why I gave up manual woodworking and shifted to ordering finished pieces from IKEA. The speed with which I can now receive furniture delivered to my door far outpaces anything I could have ever done myself.
Some people say this isn't actually woodworking — that it's just ordering stuff online — but they don't see the hours I put into selecting colors and choosing modular pieces that fit together perfectly for my space.
The future of woodworking is here, and most woodworkers aren't ready.
Same, I'm a painter, and these days I just order prints online. For me it's was always about seeing a beautiful painting before my eyes.
Some people say this isn't actually painting, but they don't see the hours and impeccable taste of mine involved in browsing the works of Canaletto and Botticelli.
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The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.
You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.
I already see people using an agent to write a git commit
What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand
Because it's not perfect and it still fabricates things from time to time.
I have coworkers who do this and it sucks to be on the receiving end of. It means I now need to read every commit message with skepticism.
It's an example of using AI to save energy for yourself while simultaneously increasing the energy expenditure of your coworkers.
I figured there must be a mix of dovetails and chainsawing: beautiful:
https://dovetailcabintools.com/videos
One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
I’ve come to the same conclusion, though my line of work was research rather than software engineering. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” It’s fun as long as I enjoyed the tunes being called, but the tunes changed, and I became less interested in playing.
I am now a tenure-track community college professor. I’m evaluated entirely by my teaching and service. While teaching a full course load is intense, and while my salary is nowhere near what a FAANG engineer makes, I get three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year to rejuvenate and to work on personal projects, with nobody telling me what research projects to work on, how frequently I should publish, and how fast I ship code.
This quote from J. J. Thomson resonates with me, and it’s more than 100 years old:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
That was the original strategy for universities: teaching was the job, and research was the side-product of having some very smart people with free time. Until some "genius" decided that it was better to have professors competing for money to pay directly for their research. This transformed a noble and desirable profession into just another money searching activity.
Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.
I wholeheartedly agree. Computing professions such as software engineering used to feel like, "Wow, they're paying me to do this!" Yes, there was real work involved, but for many of us it never felt like drudgery, and we produced, shipped, and made our customers, managers, and other stakeholders happy. I remember a time (roughly 20 years ago) when zealous enthusiasts would proudly profess that they'd work for companies like Apple or Google for free if they could work on their dream projects.
Times have changed. The field has become much more serious about making money; fantasies about volunteering at Apple have been replaced with fantasies about very large salaries and RSU grants. Simultaneously (and I don't think coincidentally), the field has become less fun. I recognized how privileged this sounds talking about "fun", given how for most of humanity, work isn't about having fun and personal fulfillment, but about making the money required to house, feed, and clothe themselves and their loved ones. Even with the drudgery of corporate life, it beats the work conditions and the abuse that many other occupations get.
Still, let's pour one out for a time when the interests and passions of computing enthusiasts did line up with the interests of the corporate world.
The money was what did it, not the AI. If we were all just tinkering with the AI all day long this stuff would still be fun.
Money sucking the joy out of things, a tale as old as time.
I didn't say they were. I feel it too.
Or just shut down your computer after work and “touch grass”. Go to the gym, hang out with friends and family.
My “brain” has always been a systems thinker. I was fortunate enough even in my first job to be directly in front of our customer and gathering requirements, not having the label for it then but trying to solve XYProblems, dealing directly with users and their pain points and seeing an entire data entry department built around my code. This was when I was 22 - 3 decades ago.
Now my brain helps me go from ambiguous, conflicting requirements, working with people, an empty AWS account and an empty git repo to a complete working solution.
Coding has always been the necesary grind between vision and implementation
Using an LLM for coding is like using a Electric shaver. It is unpredictable and you have to keep going over the same area in hopes that it will pick up the remaining few stubs of hair. Boring, irritating but very convenient.
Use a straight razor, which is predictable and you feel time flying and you end up with perfect shave.
Interesting analogy! Not all electric razors are created equal though, some will nick your skin, dull blades will pull out hair painfully. And of course, in this analogy, I'd have to point out laser hair removal. You could use the LLM to build some software to do a thing, or you could have the LLM just do it for you!
i think anyone who feels dispossessed from the advance of technology should rekindle that spirit of hands-on adventure by looking at clay pots at the museum.
the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.
did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.
find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.
I think this article misses a potential connection in the capitalist critique of LLMs to correlate this to the equivalent "industrialization" of coding. When a craft becomes industrialized, as is talked about here, you see the divergence in hobbyists and mass production.
I think because of the uniqueness or newness of the craft of programming - this shift hadn't actually occurred and you were seeing hobbyist programmers landing jobs and being able to output professional code by crafting it thoughtfully as there wasn't a major output difference previously. Now we are seeing that difference.
Food for thought, interesting article!
Absolutely. These tools are being used to deprofessionalize our work. At some point, perhaps in our lifetime, most of us will no longer be able to bring anything to the table that commands either job security or a good wage. This is the dream of most of the employing class. There will be a glut of laid off software engineers all jockeying for positions babysitting a dozen LLM agents at a time, agents that work constantly and never run out of questions and review requests to ping us with. Perhaps we'll be measured on our response time to agent inquiries. Just like all the cottage weavers who ended up stuck in a thunderously loud power loom weaving shed for 14 hours a day, we are going to discover what a big loss in status and security feels like.
Any special knowledge, taste, or communication skills we think we are bringing to the table will be siphoned into LLMs and used to train them. The way we boss the LLM around to make it produce better work will be incorporated into the next model version, rendering our contributions less and less valuable. Companies will make deals with LLM providers to suck all their internal customer interactions and team chats into the LLM so they can tune it to replicate those interactions. Perhaps it will go off the rails now and then, but think of the savings.
There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps. I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if `a = 1` after setting a to 1.
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
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.
I think this is a bit facetious. Although software had a bunch of localized impacts, it killed only a handful of mainstream professions. People still had to typeset articles, there was just less lead involved. For a writer, switching from a typewriter to a keyboard didn't mean you somehow needed less skill to write.
That said, I'm with you that it's tacky for software engineers to complain about their own hardships. We are some of the wealthiest and most pampered white collar workers out there, and we're not exactly innocent bystanders.
Precisely. I dare say software developers bemoaning this new world don't realise that they - too - are supplanters of a prior world. A sweet irony.
I wrote a comment on this thread. After reading yours I upvoted it and deleted mine: you clearly gave it more thought than I did and expressed my sentiment a lot clearer.
Thanks for the kind words :-)
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I don’t think this split is fundamental or permanent.
Look at photography.
You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.
And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.
That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.
The "it's my craft" developers seem to often disparage the "it's a means to an end" people as not being good at programming.
That can go both ways, I’m more make it go and I hate nothing more than debugging somebody else’s over complicated solution but technically fascinating code. In my world boring code is good, maintainable code.
These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address:
- Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI.
- The IP theft that powers the models.
- The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low.
- The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI.
- The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding algorithms and creating beauty.
These articles lie by omission, direct your attention to the points they want you to discuss, present false dichotomies and are generally deceptive. If these people win, we are in for a horrible future.
IDK… I don’t care.
I think there is an unheard number of people that think vibe coding is fucking stupid and knows it doesn’t work. While also being really thankful for the small task automation that AI nails every single time.
Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Why can’t I just like have a really helpful rubber duck that will find all the missing references or clean up merge issues for me?
> Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience?
Because the global economy has been wagered on this
Is that what they're wagering on though? Everytime I open X, it's all about the first to some hand-wavy definition of AGI is going to win everything, and it's the only thing that can get us through the painful transition period from massive job loss to abundance.
The cost of growing and running large LLMs far exceeds the economic value of small task automation.
Small, targeted, on-device, cheap to run models make sense in some places. General purpose LLMs that take many gigawatt data centers to lose money producing questionable output don't.
We are finding ourselves simultaneously trying to divest from fossil fuels while increasing our energy consumption faster than ever. What are we getting for it? Slop, sycophantic rubber ducks, and merge conflict Clippy.
> lose money
I think that's largely a myth. Anthropic charges something like 10x their internal $/MTok for external resellers.
> Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience?
Because of the amount of money riding on it to be a life/world-altering experience. A really helpful rubber duck is not worth the cost. The dreams of AGI is. This is from a stock market pov not dev, but market narratives dominate in the mainstream, not tech.
New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation.
"IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law.
Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use.
No matter how you slice it, this technology and capability isn't going away, and that goal post quickly shifts when it's pointed out that "ethically trained" AI gets as much hate as anything else.
Whats wrong with the original luddites that you would try and use them to disparage modern worker rights advocates? They were right. Automation did reduce their quality of life and destroy their wages, and it is only through the luddites and other worker rights organizations making their demands unignorable that gave workers more modern and fair standards like 40 hour weeks, vacations, safety regulations, and unions.
You know who built the looms that the luddites later broke? The luddites themselves. They were the one building automated looms under promises that they would make more money and have cheaper fabric. Instead what they got was towns suffering in poverty under garbage wages, shitty working conditions with longer hours, and worse quality fabric as the corporate looms penny pinched their fibre and fabric more and more.
If the benefits of automated looms were actually shared with the luddites to start with, maybe their society wouldn't have gone down the toilet and they wouldn't have been so pissed. And today corporations are far more powerful than the capitalists back in the luddite days, both monetarily and legally.
People should own the product of their work.
It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which gives them more ownership and is heritable.
BTW, I am really happy whenever I see another person who knows who the luddites really were. The rest are condemned to repeat this shit and we're all worse off because of them.
> People should own the product of their work.
You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?
Co-op businesses seem to not have a problem sharing the profits on less tangible products and services. So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative".
> So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.
> Nobody is forced to work for your business.
This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.
It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.
No, the mechanism is clear. What I don't understand is your use of the word fallacy. It is not a fallacy, it is the reality. Being an employee is not an ideal. It is the lived reality for most people.
So what are you going on about?
I've has similar discussions multiple times. Each time it boils down to one of these arguments:
a) "You're not forced to do it, you chose it so it's consensual and therefore right."
b) "The value of your work is determined by how much you managed to negotiate."
The issue with a) is that consent has to be informed and between parties with similar bargaining power, neither is true in an employer-employee relationship. Also choice from a limited set of options where some have large artificial upfront costs is not the same as 100% voluntary free choice.
The issue with b) is that the product (both the output sold to customers and the organization producing the output which can be sold by the owners) have value. This value is independent of the negotiated compensation for work.
Hence, arguments ignoring these issues are fallacious.
I see this fallacy all the time.
Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential.
Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy companies and get passive income.
Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]
I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.
[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.
[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.
[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.
There is no fallacy here. Just answer me this, instead of going on a rant tangent: Who does the cleaning? And what do they get for it?
They get ownership. The rest is determined from that, since owners collectively decide how much everyone gets paid.
(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)
See my other comment. As long as the cleaner cannot fire the CEO, but only the other way around, ownership doesn't mean anything. If you own 0.00001 percent of a company, that gives you about as much power as your vote in a democracy. Probably less so.
Why should the collective owners even have a CEO and why should he have the power to fire people? The only way would be if they collectively decided that. There are other ways to structure the company.
> 0.00001
That's a lot of zeros, must be a huge company and/or a very low skill short-time worker. And a small country if one vote is worth more than that.
Yes, I like my cleaner example. It will be a lot of zeros. Yes, let's end this discussion, I think your views are quite naive and not well thought out.
BTW the company is part of the product. If certain work needs to be done, even if it's low-skill work, it contributes to the function of that company and should give fractional ownership according to amount worked and some coefficient accounting for relative skill.
Who decides who gets hired and fired at that company? How is the coefficient determined? Are we talking about amount of work, or how much your work has contributed to the bottom line of the company?
I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.
> How is the coefficient determined?
Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation
And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.
> Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
As the cleaner you don't have the same leverage as the CEO. There would be no change in leverage at all. That's what you don't seem to understand.
As the cleaner, the only leverage would be that you don't need a job. And if you have that kind of leverage, why would you clean at all?
I am all ears for a new system that could actually work, but I don't think it will come from you. You don't seem to be willing to actually think through things.
Hierarchical top-down power structures are only useful when you need to make decisions fast. Pretty much all other times, you can have a vote. As such, I don't see why an individual ("CEO") should have the power to fire workers (or why he should even exist outside emergencies and only have powers needed to avert those emergencies).
Generally, on a team, people know who does good work and who works poorly and drags others or the whole team down. Given that, I can see hiring/firing decisions being made at the team level. If a whole team is seen as underperforming/redundant within the organization as a whole, then the team should be given the choice of either making itself leaner or severing cooperation with the rest of the company. This is still hierarchical but bottom up.
Regarding your last sentence and your general attitude, I think I'll sever our communication here.
Apologies to the user if they aren't an alt and this is just their genuine first post, but: We really ought to delegitimize the whole "creating alts to post unpopular opinions" trend. I know HN is very privacy-centric, but it just seems wrong to me when someone isn't willing to stake their reputation on (what I charitably assume are) genuinely held controversial opinions.
That's kind of the point - encouraging people to post genuine thoughts that they otherwise wouldn't because of the fear that they might suffer for it later. Sure, it doesn't always encourage the most well thought-out comments, but raising the bar for new commenters with no/low reputation is how you end up with echo chambers.
I think the policy is there for a reason. I think it encourages more free discussion. I don't know if you are upset that there is a way for people to express thoughtful ideas without being bullied for doing wrongthink or havingt he wrong opinions.
I mean I assume it's a bot comment. It has that LLM stink to it in writing style even without the "new account" signal.
IP was the wrong tool for code from the start, it was just convenient to use because it already existed.
What should be protected is human work (it and natural resources are the only things to which humanity ascribes inherent value, all other value is built on top of those).
LLMs are trained on millions of lifetimes of human work while all the income from them goes to the rich at the top. If you don't see an issue with this, not only do you not care about fairness and justice, you also haven't even gamed out in your head what happens 5 or maybe 15 years down the line.
All of your bullet points look deceptive or dishonest to me. They are either untrue or something that won't stop the march of progress. When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.
> When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.
I feel it's possibly pertinent to point out that cars didn't use existing horses or bicycles as fuel/building materials/<some other analogy here>, whereas LLMs ingest the software people have written previously during their creation.
No, you're the dishonest one. The only bullet point a reasonable person might disagree with it "99.9999%". The rest is true.
- Many real devs criticize "AI". Documented: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s?ref=i...
- LLMs are trained without respecting the licenses of the original work, not even giving attribution which almost all OSS licenses require. AGPL required derivative works to be also AGPL - this should include the model and all its output for any reasonable meaning of derived work.
- SOTA models even today produce absolute garbage. A week ago, Claude Sonnet 4.6 tried to call one constructor from the body of another in C# using syntax which doesn't exist. Less glaring issues are completely normalized. This is why "agentic" generation is so popular today - it puts guard rails around the slop.
- I and other devs I've talked to are not interested in the mechanical writing of code but in the additional understanding which comes from engaging deeply with the problem and solution.
You did not address my point. None of those things are stopping the future you are apparently afraid of. They are simply a coping mechanism.
It's not about stopping progress, it's about 1) making sure the progress is in the right direction 2) rewarding the people who actually made the progress possible instead of those who have capital.
But of course, feel free to just join the winning side. But then if you don't stand up against injustice today, I won't stand up against it tomorrow when it's happening to you.
This is probably contrary to conventional wisdom (esp among the startup/VC crowd) but: there are very few scenarios where how quickly you build something matters more than the quality of what you build.
The AI coding era has brought about an unhealthy obsession with speed of software dev (where "speed" is often measured by fallacious metrics like LOC pushed per day, but that's tangential). And it's obvious why, this is the main commercial value proposition (if you can build 2x faster, you need 50% as many devs).
Except that the speed only comes "for free" until a certain point. Beyond that point, you're trading off quality for more speed, and this trade is almost never worth it. If it takes you 6 months to handcraft a high quality version of your product (with selective AI assistance only until the boundary where it's not eating quality), almost always this is a better approach than banging out some heavily vibe/agent-coded crap in 1 month.
I guess I’m not the target audience but the flood of articles about craft or “deep blue” feel like a psyop.
When the middle class disappears and your comfortable salary is replaced by, at best, a $1000/mo UBI (that’s 12k per year by the way) most people won’t have time to think or care about this nonsense
Should we stop protesting the change and just accept it and adapt?
“Don’t ask questions, just consume Product and then get excited for next Product”.
Craft is caring about the x in y = mx + b, while the so called "it's a means to an end" care about the y.
The difference between "craft lovers" and "doers" is that one operates at a better fitting abstraction (that is more aligned to the values of capitalism).
You can say "doers" are just "craft lovers" in and of itself - there is little distinction between them - this is just reiterating the change from binary to high level languages.
I like that description. Maybe use y = f(x); now craft lovers care about the f, while doers care about the y. You usually cannot do much about the x.
> Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
I do not agree with this assertion and I don't know why I don't see more pushback against it, neither here nor in the comments for the original post.
If you're a "craft-lover" sitting next to and working with a "make-it-go person", odds are you will be very much aware of it. Even non-technical leadership is likely to be able to notice it if they're perceptive enough.
The author conflates two paradigms: The first is one of a child learning BASIC not for beauty but for making things happen on the screen. The second is an adult producing software not because he enjoys the act, challenge and workflow, but for shipping software.
I don’t see any difference between the child learning BASIC for its beauty and the chase to make things happen on the screen. Secondly, there is a very profound difference between a child creating and an adult creating for profit. The profit motive changes everything, even for someone “doing it for the love of it.”
>The market is penalizing them for it.
I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.
My take is that there used to be a significant overlap between hobbyist-style exploration/coding and what industry wanted, especially during the PC revolution where companies like Apple and Microsoft were started by hobbyists selling their creations to other people. This continued through the 1990s and the 2000s; we know the story of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. I am a 90s kid who was inspired by the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to pursue a computing career. I was also inspired by Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers.
The “hacker-friendliness” of software industry employment has been eroding in the past decade or so, and generative AI is another factor that strengthens the position of business owners and managers. Perhaps this is the maturing of the software development field. Back when computers were new and when there were few people skilled in computing, employment was more favorable for hobbyists. Over time the frontiers of computing have been settled, which reduced the need for explorers, and thus explorers have been sidelined in favor of different types of workers. LLMs are another step; while I’m not sure that LLMs could do academic research in computer science, they are already capable of doing software engineering tasks that undergraduates and interns could do.
I think what some of us are mourning is the closing of a frontier, of our figurative pastures being turned into suburban subdivisions. It’s bigger than generative AI; it’s a field that is less dependent on hobbyists for its future.
There will always be other frontiers, and even in computing there are still interesting areas of research and areas where hobbyists can contribute. But I think much of the software industry has moved in a direction where its ethos is different from the ethos of enthusiasts.
If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.
No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.
It seems like this is a Marxist that is recycling his posts through an LLM. This other post of his is eerily similar:
https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/02/acting-materialistic...
I guess there's a quota on HN where every day, some dev has to whinge about how AI is ruining The Way It Used To Be.
How is this post different than dozens that have come before it?
It's the same gnashing of teeth, just with different analogies each time.
One craft is automated and a new one is just beginning.
Building AI agents is really fun and the problem of having them be reliable adaptable efficient is actually really challenging and I'm having a lot of fun with it trying to figure it out.
To me it's a lot like factorio or my personal favorite Dyson sphere program where at first you do everything by hand and then you automate and then you automate the automation.
For the first time in human history we can automate intelligence with a computer but just because we can automate it doesn't mean all the good automation is good and we need engineers who can figure out how to automate it reliably scale it deploy it maintain it.
And yes eventually we will automate the automation too.
All the whingers about AI - if it is as bad as you say, then you don't have a problem
On the other hand, if it is not, then stop wasting effort arguing against the inevitable and use that effort to get ahead of the curve.
Either way, whinging about it is the least effective use of your skills and time.