Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.
Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?
I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice.
I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :)
For straightforward stuff, they can handle it.
For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up.
--
To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...)
I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience.
I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers.
Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
All that being said:
There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument basically boils down to "AI bad". Those people are in trouble because they are also the people who insist on a whole committee meeting and trail of design documents to change the color of a button on a website that sells shoes. Most of their actual hard skills are pretty easy to outsource to an AI.
There's also a techbro segment of the population, who are selling snake oil about AGI being imminent, so fire your whole team and hire me in order to outsource your entire product to an army of AI agents. Their thoughts basically boil down to "I'm a grifter, and I smell money". Nevermind the fact that the outcome of such a program would be a smoldering tire fire, they'll be onto the next grift by then.
As with literally everything, there are loud, crazy people on either side and the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Bad code is bad code. There’s been bad code since day one; the question is how fast are you willing to fail, learn, fail again, learn more, and keep going.
LLMs make failing fast nearly effortless, and THAT is power that I think young people really take to.
My biggest gripe with the hype, as there's so much talk of craftmanship here, is: most programmers I've met hate doing code reviews and a good proportion prefer rewriting to reading and understanding other people's code. Now suddenly everyone is to be a prompter and astute reviewer of a flood of code they didn't write and now that you have the tool you should be faster faster faster or there's a problem with you.
All this hype and especially the AGI talks want to treat the AI as an engineer itself. Even an assuredly senior engineer above is saying that it's better than them. So I think it's valid to ask "well can it do [thing a senior engineer does on the daily]" if we're suggesting that it can replace an engineer.
Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly.
Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.
No. Because he didn’t build it. He didn’t even have the idea for it. He gets respect for telling a lot of people “no” and for saying “not this” and “not that,” for being an excellent editor, but he does NOT get any credit for building m the iPhone.
That was thousands of other people.
By the way, what does being an editor look like?
It looks a lot like telling an LLM, “no, not that. Not that either. Try it this way. Mmm, not quite. Here, let me show you a sketch. Try something like that. Yes, that’s it!!”
I consider myself a craftsman. I craft tools. I also am a manager. I also am a consultant. I am both a subcontractor and I subcontract out.
Above all else I’m a hacker.
I also use LLM’s daily and rather enjoy incorporating this new technology into what I consider my craft.
Please stop arrogantly presuming you know what is best for me to think and feel about all of this.
You can certainly outsource "up", in terms of skill. That's just how business works, and life... I called a plumber not so long ago! And almost everyone outsources their health...
Not respect as a carpenter, but perhaps respect as a businessperson or visionary.
Of course you can also get useless intermediaries, which may be more akin to vibe coding. Not entirely without merit, but the human in the loop is providing questionable value. I think this is the exception rather than the norm.
Using that line of reasoning I could also argue "Using libraries isn't craftmanship, a real craftsman implements all functionality themselves."
Taking just images, consider AI merely a different image capture mechanism, like the camera is vs. painting. (You could copy.paste many critiques about this sort of ai and just replace it with "camera") Sure it's more accessible to a non professional, in AI's case much more so than cameras wear to years of learning painting. But there's a world of difference between what most people do in a prompt online and how professionals integrating it into their workflow are doing. Are such things "art"? That's not a productive question, mostly, but there's this: when it occurs, it has every bit as much intention, purpose and from a human behind it as that which people complain is lacking, but are referring to the one-shot prompt process in their mind when they do.
a) Nothing about letting AI do grunt work for you is "not being a craftsman". b) Things are subcontracted all the time. We don't usually disrespect people for that.
We need to find such craftsmen first. A true craftmaan should be able to let the code speak for itself. And ideally they'd be able to teach well enough to have other adapt such a workflow, which inevitably includes constraints and methodologies.
That's the things I don't see enough of in these discussions. We're very afraid to talk about what AI is bad at, as if it's some sort of pampered child we need to keep pleasing. That's not how we attain progress in the craft. Maybe in the stock market, but at that point it's clear what the focus is.
It reduces craftsmanship to unskilled labor.
The design work and thinking happen somewhere else. The operator comes in, punches a clock, and chokes on MDF dust for 8 hours.
This is a GOOD thing.
The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work.
The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.