I'm fascinated by the level of existential crisis developers seem to be going through.
The uncomfortable truth is nobody needs you to be an artisan coder.
Nobody cares about how you coded your app,...
There's truth here — nobody cares about elegant abstractions if the product doesn't ship. But "free from craft" and "free from understanding" aren't the same thing.
When the AI-generated code breaks at 2am, someone has to read it. When you audit what got deployed, someone has to follow the logic. When the abstraction leaks — and it always does — the person who never bothered to understand their stack is just dependent on a different master.
The artisan who treated craft as identity might need to let that go. The one who treated understanding as the actual skill is fine.
When the AI-generated code breaks at 2am, someone has to read it. When you audit what got deployed, someone has to follow the logic. When the abstraction leaks — and it always does — the person who never bothered to understand their stack is just dependent on a different master.
The artisan who treated craft as identity might need to let that go. The one who treated understanding as the actual skill is fine.
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