Comment by matt_s
6 days ago
> This was the craftsman’s ‘Golden Age’ and much time and trouble was taken over the design of tools. Craftsmen were being called upon to do more skilful and exacting work and the use of tools and the interest in development had become very widespread.
Above pulled from A Brief History of the Woodworking Plane [0]. A woodworking tool that has evolved over 2,000 years. Now there are electric planers, handheld electric planers and lots of heavy machinery that do the same thing in a very automated way. If a company is mass producing kitchen cabinets, they aren't hand planing edges on boards, a machine is doing all that work.
I feel like with AI we are on the cusp of moving beyond a "Golden age" and into an "industrial age" for coding, where it will become more important to have code that AI understands vs. something that is carefully crafted. Simple business pressure will demand it (whether we like it or not).
^ A comment I made just yesterday on a different thread.
For software developers AI is like the cabinet maker that gets a machine to properly mill and produce cabinet panels, sure you can use a hand plane to do that but you're producing a very different product and likely one that not many people will care about, possibly not even your employer when they see all the other wood shops pumping out cabinetry and taking their market share.
[0] https://www.handplane.com/879/a-brief-history-of-the-woodwor...
The difference is that programming is creating the design for the furniture and the process to assemble it using machines. Compilation and deployment is the factory in this case. So you're trying to automate away the design aspect where we already have the other aspects automated.