Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps, but damn, fixing shitty code is not the "craft" that I signed up for twenty years ago.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.

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.

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.

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’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).

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Why is this never a "we can make more products" conversation with businesses? It's always about how many people we can not pay versus how many more things we can sell.

I think this is very telling of where the message is coming from and how the tools are being sold.

Typically a good thing would be creating more value for a company's consumers, not increasing unemployment. Are these tools to make our lives better or to increase profits for shareholders without taking risks?

“Don’t ask questions, just consume Product and then get excited for next Product”.

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.