Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

> developers fall into two camps:

> Craft-focused developers enjoy the process of writing code…

> Delivery-focused developers care about shipping products.

What the hell am I, then? I’m a craft-focused developer who cares about shipping products, and I like AI.

I find that AI doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of the craft. It reduces my need to type code with my fingers. I’m able to spend more time thinking above the code and put more time into getting a good design instead of getting something that just works. I’m not doing 100% AI generated code, though. I still find that there are lots of fiddly refactors that AI is too clumsy for.

I get the sense that most programmers don’t like to refactor. They enjoy the process of getting something working, but don’t like the process of making it good. To me, refactoring is the craft. That’s the part that I love. AI gives me more time for that.

The divide described in the article is just nonsense. Maybe it's more along the lines of those who focus on quality versus those who focus on shipping. In the end, we want both, but which aspect is more important to either party is what I get from a good faith read of the article.

If you care most about quality then you realize that AI coding assistants are fundamentally unable to provide that since they fundamentally rehash what they have been trained on, which is, fundamentally, mediocre code, on average. It must be, because it's hard (impossible?) to measure, so can't be filtered out of the training data. Quality focus engineers (the "craft" folks) don't consider that enough. If all you want is ship, you don't care.

And that'a fair, it's a matter of personal priorities, and customers value these things differently too, so there is a place in the market for either. But please stop phrasing this in terms of loving syntax puzzles or such nonsense.

I find it useful for some things, and not for others. I've gotten pretty good at judging what both Claude and I are going to do well, and what each of us will make a right mess of. Happiness lies in the middle ground.

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