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...
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.
Not respect as a carpenter, but perhaps respect as a businessperson or visionary.
Using that line of reasoning I could also argue "Using libraries isn't craftmanship, a real craftsman implements all functionality themselves."
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.
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.