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Comment by pjm331 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t write the same program over and over again so I am always confused by how exactly this industrialization metaphor is supposed to map on to software development

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Think of it this way, the Persian rug isn't the same pattern every time either. The base job is the same, but the implementation requires planning and the like. A rug making machine is good at creating the same thing over and over again, but not very good in being flexible.

Software... a lot of software is basically the same thing (database, api, frontend), the only difference is what data and business rules. But the act of writing code isn't very different. It's the what code to write where software engineers come in.

A better analogy is that software dev is more like making the rug making machine. If you were doing that, it would be useful to be intimately familiar with precisely how rugs are made, and you might want to make a bit of one by hand in order to get that experience. Then when you design the machine, you use gears, 4 bar linkages, and other mechanisms that you are already familiar with because you carefully studied those concepts earlier, likely with some hands-on exercise. Then you draw a design, simulate it, and send it to a machine shop and can possibly never touch the machine itself (although I think in practice these kinds of bespoke first-gen machines need debugging after manufacturing).

I.e. in order to get to the point where you didn't have to manually touch this thing, you likely did have to learn deeply about its underlying concepts by manually doing things.

Operating machines doesn't always have the same phenomenon. E.g. experience with a hand-powered drill is unnecessary to use an electric drill.

Most of the software which was the same thing has been abstracted already in CRM, WordPress, content builders, website generators...

What's left is a lot of very different software which have very few things in common.

> the only difference is what data and business rules

The "only" difference? Wow.

Database, API and Frontend are tools and generic raw material that need to be whittled down into the final shape.

for all the CRUD apps out there, which are not the full set of software programs

I didn't mean it literally in the sense of "the machine can produce 1000 copies of the same program!" (which indeed would not need an LLM to accomplish...). I meant industrial-era automation in the wider sense of "a machine and a human operator can do in one week the work previously done by 10 people in two months".

To put it another way: a generalisation of OP's question is "is it worth spending a lot of effort learning to do X manually, when a machine can do a lower-quality version of X massively faster and cheaper than I can ever do?" In the article, X = coding. I wanted to check if the arguments given for "yes, and" hold for different values of X and the first that came to my mind was rugs; probably unfortunate that I know nothing of that topic...

I don't think that the answers for one value of X always apply completely to other values of X (i.e. whatever happened to hand-woven rugs might well be very different than what happens with coding) but I found it an interesting thought experiment, because I can fully see a master artisan of any type of X giving a very close version of the article's arguments. Maybe finding when they were eventually right and when they were not for past scenarios can teach me something now. Maybe...

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