Comment by rolisz
3 days ago
First, I agree with tptacek that Ghostty is a work of craftsmanship. Mitchell is a very talented dev and he says he greatly benefits from using AI.
On the other hand I understand your point that some people got into coding because of coding and they like doing that manually. Unfortunately, we're not being paid to do what we like, but to solve problems with code. What we like is usually a hobby. Software engineering had a golden run for 20-30 years where we were paid well to do things we enjoyed doing, but unfortunately that might change. As an analogy, think about woodworking: there's craftsmanship in a nice wood table, but at the end of day I won't pay thousands of dollars for one, when a couple of hundred dollars will buy me a good enough one from IKEA (maybe you're not like that, but the general population is).
I love coding, and I'm extremely picky, but I also agree with you it's not what I'm being paid to do. And even in hobby projects there are plenty of rough drafts necessary that I can outsource to an LLM, and then I get to refine things afterward, when they're working, and I can obsess over details...
To take your table analogy, which I fully agree with, if I wanted to take the effort of crafting a nice wooden table, I'd happily have someone cut the pieces for me and do the basic stuff that doesn't require specific skills, and then spend my time applying the finer details that makes the difference between a basic table and a great table. I get that some people would want to do everything "from scratch", but I'd rather focus on where I can make the most difference.