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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.

As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.

Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.

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100% agree. I understand the argument around the "fun" of programming and learning. But my joy from coding (especially when working 9-5, on a team of 5-500 people) always came from the value creation for other people and for society.

AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.

My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.

However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.

I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.

Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.

> my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.

You need both. You really need both. A salesman to keep the craftsman from getting too bogged down in details to ever finish, and the craftsman to keep the salesman from ever lowering quality too much that customers start seeing the company as money grubbing misers trying to make a quick buck.

It only works with both. Too much of one and you sink.

This can be seen time and again in successful endeavours. (Apple, Microsoft, Google, star wars, honestly so many movies, moon landings, the list could go on)

I don't think you really are struggling to understand, you just don't agree.

Some people genuinely enjoy the process of thinking hard about a problem and writing the code that solves it.

Literally the entire "flow" of coding has changed. It's now about parallel agent management and testing, less about any actual writing of code. Even thinking hard about problems has been reduced due to how insanely good AI has gotten.

The other side of this equation is the people who now pump out socks for pennies. You can get what you’re advocating for but it means software development becoming something closer to sweat shops.

I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.

Off topic but I find it interesting that "this resonates with me" shifted to "I resonate with this" in colloquial English.

Language is fun!

I'm, like, 99% sure I am dyslexic. So, I might be the worst example of spoken and written language usage possible.

Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.

You're not the first person I've seen using it shifted.

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