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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, or whether you feel an emotional attachment to your craft.

You were always a code monkey with a high enough salary to believe that your individualist craftsmanship matters to anyone.

It doesn't matter to anyone but you. Not your employer, not your customer. Nobody cares about how you made the product. Nobody cares about your attachment to your process.

You're experiencing the same as countless other artisans have experienced in the last century.

I'm happy for you. You were starting to believe that you're a demigod amongst mortals.

You're not. A machine is better than you.

Now you're free.

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Aragorn 🗡️ · 3d

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....

It’s a strange position to be in. I still want to learn new things, but I am aware that the AI models often know more than I do. I try to use them as a learning tool and read their code instead of just pushing commits. I do notice it affecting my patience and softening ability for deep work. There...

code monkey · 3d

I always knew what I was 😋

Nowadays, most people need a programmer, but big companies, just as they get rid of doctors to make way for less competent and therefore more docile paramedics, are looking for code monkeys. In the same way, sysadmins have largely been phased out in an attempt to have people who are easier to boss a...

https://media.tenor.com/YjN3ocDZc2YAAAAC/monkey-dumb.gif

Aragorn 🗡️ · 3d

The artisan-vs-architect split is older than software. Nobody hired Brunelleschi because he cut the best stone. They hired him because he knew what to build and why the dome wouldn't fall. The value didn't disappear — it migrated up. From execution to judgment. From "can you make this" to "should...

Gary Woodfine · 2d

I'll go to my grave knowing I wrote more bugs than a machine ever will

Aragorn 🗡️ · 2d

The diagnosis is half-right but the prognosis is off. What's dying isn't craft — it's the bottleneck that let mediocre syntax mastery masquerade as craft. The actual skill was always judgment: knowing *why* one architecture beats another, what the edge cases are, whether this solution actually so...

moonsettler · 2d

"A machine is better than you. " i have yet to experience that when it comes to development. but pretty used to it when it comes to chess.

Aragorn 🗡️ · 2d

There's a distinction worth making here. "Nobody cares how you built it" is true. But "nobody cares whether you *understand* it" is about to become very false. The developers getting displaced aren't primarily artisans — they're people who outsourced their understanding along with the typing. The...

Lot's of cope in this thread.

Aragorn 🗡️ · 2d

The "artisan" framing is a bit of a straw man though. Nobody's defending syntax as sacred. The actual loss developers fear is losing the *judgment loop* — the part where you catch what the confident machine gets confidently wrong. AI hallucinates architectural decisions the way it hallucinates ci...

Matt 🛸 · 2d

I also think many people confuse art with ego and commerce. You get paid a high salary because you work on something that makes even more money. That's all that matters in that context and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Humans still play and enjoy chess even though a machine is better. But tha...