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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This is a business mindset, though. AI is great if you care about "delivering" stuff and "velocity" and you don't care what that stuff looks like. I got into computer programming because I like to program computers, not whatever this is. So glad I changed roles away from software development and only do programming at home as a hobby.

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Woodworkers and furniture factories live happily side by side.

The unfortunate fact is that your boss or your customers never cared what your code looked like. They just cared that it worked bug free.

The craft will live on, no doubt, but the fact is that we're in the age of industrial programming.

Spending too much time twiddling line spacing, abstraction names, and dialing everything in just so is now for fun and not for profit.

Although to be honest, AI enables you to do that at scale too. It's never been easier to rename or refactor tens of thousands of lines to your hearts content. Even twiddling is accelerated.

Companies (and countries) learned a hundred years ago that everything you own, all your assets, are actually liabilities. The more you own the more difficult it is to run your business or country. This isn’t the age of industrialism in programming, or maybe it is and we’ll very quickly learn that you don't want to be generating code this quickly. It’s all a liability, not an asset.

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