Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves. Consumer software tends to be more user-friendly (or it won't sell), but popular software isn't always what you want.
When writing software for yourself, there is a bias towards implementing just the features you want and never mind the rest. Sometimes the result can be pretty sloppy, but it works.
However, code health is a choice. You just need to know what to ask for. A coding agent can be used as a power washer to tidy up a project. This won't result in great art, but like raking leaves or cleaning your steps or plowing a driveway, it can be satisfying.
Just as you wouldn't use a power washer to clean a painting, maybe there's some code that's too delicate to use a coding agent on? But for a project that has good tests and isn't that delicate, which I believe includes most web apps, nobody's going to want to pay for you to do it by hand anymore. It would be like paying someone to clear the snow in a parking lot with a shovel rather than hiring someone with a plow.
* Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves.*.
Don’t forget that managers have different goals than file and rank employees.
For SaaS I work for we get requirements like required fields for a process that manager needs to have correct data and for insights into business process.
After we deliver software we get support tickets from employees that are using system nagging that “it takes too much time to fill in all this data” and that we should “fix our shitty system”.
They don’t care and they don’t have full knowledge why stuff is required - which is fault of managers that are not training their people and explaining “why”.
Oh and of course they have to copy paste shit over and over because their company won’t have budget for us integrating with their CRM and we won’t invest in something that benefits only single customer who might not renew the license next year - but also they don’t want to make a commitment like 5 years contract where we could do some investment. Of course there are some that invest in connecting the CRM but it mostly is an exception rather than the rule.
Enterprise software is also particularly bad because many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want. Leading to a million weird functions, toggles, configurability because some manager in charge of making a big purchase demanded that first it must do X, many of these features left with not even a single user after the original requester leaves. While consumer software the individual consumers just get what they are given, and a single product manager/team decide what's best.
>many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want
This here so much. When some group paying you millions is saying they want a feature or they will look at competitors all kinds of crap ends up in the software.
Right, and then you also have public sector software, and transnational software generally, where the provider actually needs to cater to a plethora of rules and regulations.
Consumer software can be good, but it's often also optimized for max engagement, not for the actual value or functionality.
Enterprise software can be because there isn't an incentive mismatch, good solution is more valuable for the customers, it will sell better and they're willing to pay for it.
But like you say, lot of enterprise software is bad because it's optimized for the payer, not the user, and it's often shoehorned to weird workflows of the particular enterprise.
I think we should embrace AI to craft better software. You have a lot of control over the code generated by AI, so all your designs, patterns, best practices can be used in the generated code. This will make us better software craftsmen.
A nice example is guitar building: there's a whole bunch of luthiers that stick to traditional methods to build guitars, or even just limit themselves to japanese woodworking tools.
But that is not the only way to build great guitars. It can be done by excellent luthiers, building high quality quitars with state of the art tools. For example Ulrich Teuffel who uses all sorts of high tech like CAD systems and CDC machines to craft beautiful guitars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo
Unfortunately, craftsmanship does not come cheap, so most customers will turn to industrially created products. Same for software.
But your comparison is a bit off; you mention CNC machines and the like to build guitars, but those are tools that are still exactly programmed by humans. LLMs on the other hand are probabilistic - you prompt "write me a set of gcode instructions for a CNC to build a guitar body" and wait / hope.
Sure, LLMs as a tool probably have a place in software development, but the danger lies in high volume, low oversight.
But there's people using it large scale to build large applications, time will tell how they work out in the end. Software engineering is programming over time, and the "over time" for LLM based software engineering hasn't been long enough yet.
You have a lot of control over what the LLM creates. The way you phrase your requirements, give it guidance over architecture, testing, ux, libraries to use. You can build your own set of skills to outline how you want the LLM to automate your software process. There's a lot of craftmanship in making the LLM do exactly what you think it needs to do. You are not a victim at the mercy of your LLM.
You are a lead architecture, a product manager, a lead UXer, a lead architect. You don't have 100% control over what your LLM devs are doing, but more than you think. Just like normal managers don't micromanage every action of their team.
I agree. The article's logic is incoherent. It conflates the choice of tools with the decision what product to make and what level of quality to aim for.
If AI can be used to make bad (or good enough) software more cheaply, I have no problem with that. I'm sure we will get a huge amount of bad software. Fine.
But what matters is whether we get more great software as well. I think AI makes that more likely rather than less likely.
Less time will be spent on churning out basic features, integrations and bug fixes. Putting more effort into higher quality or niche features will become economically viable.
I don't get why the author assumes AI-assisted coding can never produce elegant software. I am learning new things from AI almost in every interaction.
I love the references to Jacques Ellul's ideas, which I think are interesting to reflect on in an AI age. It helps make clear that what is fundamentally at stake in much technological "progress" is an (often only tacitly acknowledged) sublimation of "efficiency" to the place of highest value.
What's fascinating is that this value elevation seems to have gone largely unchallenged, despite being in essence an arbitrary value choice. Other choices are possible. And, I hope, still are possible, despite what the bigcorps declare must be the case in order to maximize shareholder returns.
Efficiency is easy to measure. And whatever is measured becomes the goal.
It is harder to measure craft, care, or wonder. My best proxy is emails from real people, but those are sporadic, unpredictable, and a lot harder to judge than analytics screens that update every minute.
100%. This is what I posted about on Hacker News ([1] where it got no traction) and Reddit [2] (where it led to a discussion but then got deleted by a mod).
Efficiency isn't even the best way to optimize for (expected) shareholder returns for an organization! Efficiency fundamentally trades-off against adaptability and resilience.
> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code.
I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing.
Its still engineering work. The code still matters. Its just a different tool to write the code.
I'd compare the difference between manually coding and operating a coding agent to the difference between a handsaw and a chainsaw - the end result is the same but the method is very different.
But a lot of people don't think like this, and we must come to the unavoidable conclusion that the LLM code is better than what they are used to, be their own code, or from their colleagues.
Sure and lots of times I can walk places. That doesn't mean bikes, cars, trains and planes aren't incredibly useful. They let me achieve things I can't in other ways for example transporting cargo without a team of people to help me. Just like AI coding.
>I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing.
Do you have any advice to share (or resources)? Have you experienced it yourself?
The practical limit is the latency and inference cost. A full planning and validation loop burns a lot of tokens, and waiting for that cycle breaks flow compared to just writing the code.
Most software engineers were not “crafting” before AI. They were writing sloppy code for the sake of profit, getting a pay check, and going home. Which is why AI also outputs the same crappy code.
Rumor has it there were a few elite crafters among the lot. Software wizards who pondered about systems and architecture as they had a $10 espresso macchiato.
New technology does not eliminate old technology or craftsmanship. It just shifts who uses it and what for.
- Power tools didn't annihilate the craftsmanship of hand-tool woodworking. Fine woodworkers are still around and making money using hand tools, as well as hobbyists. But contractors universally switched to power tools because they help them make more money with less labor/cost/time.
- A friend of mine still knits on a loom because she likes using a loom. Some people knit by hand because they like that better. Neither of them stopped just because of large automated looms.
- Blacksmiths still exist and make amazing metal crafts. That doesn't mean there isn't a huge market for machine cast or forged metal parts.
In the future there'll just be the "IDE people" and the "Agent Prompt people", both plugging away at whatever they do.
You give examples where crafts based on pre-industrial technology still exist. You're right, but you're proving the GP's point.
200 years ago, being a blacksmith was a viable career path. Now it's not. The use of hand tools, hand knitting, and hand forging is limited to niche, exotic, or hobbyist areas. The same could be said of making clothes by hand or developing film photographs. Coding will be relegated to the same purgatory: not completely forgotten, but considered an obsolete eccentricity. Effectively all software will be made by AI. Students will not study coding, the knowledge of our generation will be lost.
The examples given are using tools to do well-defined, repeatable processes. So far, despite many attempts by upper management to make software the same way, it hasn't happened, and AI doesn't appear to be any different.
I don't see a huge difference between people writing in a high-level language and people writing complex prompts.
I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant.
I remember when I first started out programming 20 years ago, there was time to craft good quality code. Then there were more and more pushes to get more code out faster, and no one really cared about the quality. Bugs became part of the cost of doing business. I think GenAI for code fits well in the more recent paradigm, and comparing it with hand-crafted code of yore is a bit disingenuous, as appealing as it may be, because most code hasn't been that good for a long time.
I am sad to admit it, but AI is just fitting in where poor coding practices have already existed, and flourishing in that local maxima.
I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops.
But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers.
I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are learning to incorporate AI as a force multiplier.
As someone who resists agents, I agree with all of this 100%, especially that it's not said enough, because this is exactly what I've railed against most of my career. There is a HUGE "LOL all code sucks" sentiment across the majority of our industry and I friggin' hate it.
This really nails the core issue: AI thrives in environments where software is treated as “good enough” optimization rather than craft. It’s not replacing great engineers so much as exposing how much of modern software has already become rote, metric-driven work. The Arts & Crafts parallel feels especially apt as mass-produced code gets cheaper, human judgment and taste become the real scarce resources.
This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted.
I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other.
"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to >>circumvent standard labor practices<< of the time."
Luckily, the brave government's troops, show trials and making '"machine breaking" (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime"' solved the crisis of these awful, entitled workers' demands once and for all and across all time.
I'm sure that any uppity workers in our present age can also be taught the appropriate lessons.
I wonder if the workers of the time were as responsible for the propaganda as we are... It seems like the ultimate heist when capital can get labour to propagate their own messaging.
Ordinarily yes I’d love to overthrow the bourgeoisie (check my history, I live in flagged threads), but this time I think this thread is really just about the evolution of the profession.
The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:
> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.
I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish.
when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand.
when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might change, but claims that we're at the point where computers can meaningfully displace that work are pretty weak.
Cloth absolutely has gotten worse over the last two hundred years since industrialization. It's also orders of magnitude cheaper, making it worth it, and certainly new types of cloth are available that weren't before, but we're not better off in every possible way.
> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological.
Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market...
But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel like there isn't enough time anymore.
Software quality about speed of delivery and lack of bugs.
If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.
Ive yet to meet many AI champions who are explicit about their desire to make that trade off though. Even the ones who downplay software quality arent super happy about the bugs.
> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.
While the speed and scale at which these happen is definitely important (and I agree that AI code can pose a problem on that front), this applies to every human-written piece of software I've ever worked on too.
Maybe kids will end up preferring to talk to bots, much like the generations after my own actually preferred digital compression artifacts in their music.
Can it get me a job if I get laid off (networking)? Can I crash on its couch for a while? It might displace tv/netflix, which yes is a huge market, but I don't think much more than that.
Stop arguing about whether AI ruins craft.
Fix the incentive structures so that increased productivity buys humans time, not disposability.
Then see what kind of craft emerGe
Unfortunately it seems the incentive structures are ultimately set by global competition and the security dilemma. So short of total world disarmament and UBI, fundamentally the incentive will always be to work harder than your opponent to preserve your own security.
> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code.
As for lies and bad code, it didn't appear with AI. Humans lied and produced bad code before AI.
How does the author empirically know AI does not understand? And if it does not understand right now, is a machine fundamentally unable to understand? Is understanding an exclusive human ability? Is it because machines lack a soul? It sounds quite dualistic (Descartes'view that mind and body and fundamentally different).
Don't get me know, I think right now, AI is less a good at understanding humans than other humans (or even dogs) in many contexts because it has no access to non verbal signals. But in the context of building software, it is good enough and I don't see why a machine should not be able to understand humans.
I have had an interesting experience just recently.
I hired back on at a company I used to work at and found they had contracted work to another former employee who was handed the code from a rest api I had written and a web app that used it. The task was to write an android app that interacted with the api.
He ran it through an agentic coding assistant and got out api scaffolding and basic UI.
Looking it over, I couldn't shake the feeling I was looking at my code, just ported to kotlin. I was seeing my idiosyncrasies everywhere. It was kind of surreal.
I was familiar with the dev's work who did it and it was nothing like his prior work, but it's been years since I have seen him, so who knows.
I couldn't help but admit it was a good foundation to start building on.
I told the pm they were likely overpaying significantly for an agentic coding assistant and only getting access to it for a few hours a month. This same organization recoiled in terror when I pointed out the cost of a claude code subscription once.
On a side track, I wish to express my fears regarding AI
Unfortunately for the general populace, most technological improvements in information technology, for the past 5 decades, has lead to loss of political control and lessened their leverage for political change.
With AI, this change is going to be accelerated a 100 times.
With current AI slop, and more importantly, almost indistinguishable from reality, AI based content, the populace is going slowly learning to reject what they see and what they hear from mass media.
AI has muddied the pool so much, that every fish, us, cannot see the whole pool. What this will lead to, is for political figures and bad actors to, much more easily almost with no effort at all, create isolation among people.
No event will create a mass uprising, because no event can be believed by a common mass. It will be easy to generate an alternative reality using the same AI.
Now, the political class and the billionaire class, are free to act with impunity, because the last check on their power, the power of mass media to form public opinion, to inspire the masses to demand change or accountability, has eroded to the point of no return. (They have already captured the institutions of public power)
I fear for the future of humanity.
Edit : There are already troubling signs from the billionaire class regarding this. There is a narrative to "ensure guardrails" for AI, sort of giving the populace the idea that once that is done, AI is acceptable. This is like saying, "better have a sleeve on the knife, so that no one can cut with it, but use it as a prop in a movie"
They are creating this narrative that AI is inevitable.
They are fear mongering that AI is going to take jobs, which it will, but it also goads the capable ones to get on to the bandwagon and advance AI further.
Mass media has been going to shit for a long time anyway. People have always chosen to believe tons of insane things.
AI will cause plenty of problems of course, because it puts a powerful tool in the hands of those who shouldn't use it, but also, many people shouldn't drive cars or use the internet.
AI is inevitable, just as calculators and computers were. I suspect that no humans will write code by hand in a not so distant future. The machines will be far too effective.
Personally, I love the acceleration we're seeing since the coming of computers. The internet is a big black mirror, scary, beautiful, and ugly, just like us. AI feels similar to me.
Will some things get worse because of AI? Probably. But maybe it'll also help to save us from ourselves. If nothing else, it will probably force some investment into long overdue security, identity, and trust issues.
> People have said that software engineering at large tech companies resembles "plumbing"
> AI code [..] may also free up a space for engineers seeking to restore a genuine sense of craft and creative expression
This resonates with me, as someone who joined the industry circa 2013, and discovered that most of the big tech jobs were essentially glorified plumbers.
In the 2000s, the web felt more fun, more unique, more unhinged. Websites were simple, and Flash was rampant, but it felt like the ratio of creators to consumers was higher than now.
With Claude Code/Codex, I've built a bunch of things that usually would die at a domain name purchase or init commit. Now I actually have the bandwidth to ship them!
This ease of dev also means we'll see an explosion in slopware, which we're already starting to see with App Store submissions up 60% over the last year[0].
My hope is that, with the increase of slop, we'll also see an increase in craft. Even if the proportion drops, the scale should make up for it.
We sit in prefab homes, cherishing the cathedrals of yesteryear, often forgetting that we've built skyscrapers the ancient architects could never dream of.
More software is good. Computers finally work the way we always expected them to!
> joined the industry circa 2013, and discovered that most of the big tech jobs were essentially glorified plumbers
Most tech jobs are glorified plumbers. I've worked in big tech and in small startups, and most of the code everywhere is unglamorous, boring, just needs to be written.
Satisfaction with the job also depends on what you want out of it. I know people who love building big data pipelines, and people who love building fancy UIs. Those two groups would find the other's job incredibly tedious.
The right job for a person depends on whether they can rise above the specific flavor of pain that the job dishes out. BigTech jobs strike me as having an inextricable political element to them: so you enjoy jockeying for titles and navigating constant reorgs?
The pay is nice but I find myself…remarkably unenvious as I get older.
Plumbing has certification and industry best practices, and its leaks generally affect a few blocks at most rather than spraying across the entire internet.
Er... we sit in prefab homes? Trailers are generally considered to be the worst possible quality of home construction and actually lose value instead of the normal appreciation real estate has.
The framing of craft vs. slop misses something important: most production software quality problems aren't about aesthetics or elegance, they're about correctness under real-world conditions.
I've been using AI coding tools heavily for the past year. They're genuinely useful for the "plumbing" - glue code, boilerplate, test scaffolding. But where they consistently fail is reasoning about system-level concerns: authorization boundaries, failure modes, state consistency across services.
The article mentions AI works best on "well-defined prompts for already often-solved problems." This is accurate. The challenge is that in production, the hard problems are rarely well-defined - they emerge from the interaction between your code and reality: rate limits you didn't anticipate, edge cases in user behavior, security assumptions that don't hold.
Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.
> Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.
That's why I'm of the opinion that for senior developers/architects, these coding agents are awesome tools.
For a junior developer? Unless they are of the curious type and develop the systems-level understanding on their own... I'd say there's a big chance the machine is going to replace their job.
Most people using LLMs dont have this craft...... which begs the question. Should they be using LLMs in the first place? Nope. But given that its rammed down their throat by folks internally and externally, they will.
something incredible just happened, I was moving in my bed and somehow pressed the hotkey combination for reader mode on my keyboard, which centered everything nicely for me
It’s easy to forget that any artifact - painting, music, text, or software - that appeals to a large number of people is, by definition, an average on the spectrum of quality.
Popular music tends to be generic. Popular content is mostly brainrot these days. Popular software is often a bloated mess because most users’ lives don’t revolve around software. They use software to get something done and move on.
I never understood the appeal of “craft” in software. Early computer pioneers were extremely limited by the tech of their time, so the software they hacked together felt artsy and crafty. Modern software feels industrial because it is industrial - it’s built in software factories.
Industrial software engineers don’t get paid to do art. There are research groups that do moonshot experiments, and you can be part of that if it’s your thing. But lamenting the lack of craft in industrial software is kind of pointless. Imagine if we’d stopped at crafty, handmade auto engines and never mass-produced them at scale. We don’t lament “crafty engines” anymore. If you want that, go buy a supercar.
Point is: AI is just another tool in the toolbox. It’s like Bash, except calling it that won’t pull in billions of dollars in investment. So “visionaries” call it ghost in the machine, singularity, overlord, and whatnot. It produces mediocre work and saves time writing proletariat software that powers the world. Crafty code doesn’t pay the bills.
But I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek out fun in computing. We absolutely should. It’s just that criticizing AI for not being able to produce art is an old thing. The goalpost keeps shifting, and these tools keep crushing it.
I don’t use AI to produce craft, because I don’t really do craft in software - I have other hobbies for that. But I absolutely, proudly use it to generate mediocre code that touches millions of people’s lives in some way.
Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves. Consumer software tends to be more user-friendly (or it won't sell), but popular software isn't always what you want.
When writing software for yourself, there is a bias towards implementing just the features you want and never mind the rest. Sometimes the result can be pretty sloppy, but it works.
However, code health is a choice. You just need to know what to ask for. A coding agent can be used as a power washer to tidy up a project. This won't result in great art, but like raking leaves or cleaning your steps or plowing a driveway, it can be satisfying.
Just as you wouldn't use a power washer to clean a painting, maybe there's some code that's too delicate to use a coding agent on? But for a project that has good tests and isn't that delicate, which I believe includes most web apps, nobody's going to want to pay for you to do it by hand anymore. It would be like paying someone to clear the snow in a parking lot with a shovel rather than hiring someone with a plow.
* Enterprise software tends to particularly bad because it's being sold to managers who won't use it themselves.*.
Don’t forget that managers have different goals than file and rank employees.
For SaaS I work for we get requirements like required fields for a process that manager needs to have correct data and for insights into business process.
After we deliver software we get support tickets from employees that are using system nagging that “it takes too much time to fill in all this data” and that we should “fix our shitty system”.
They don’t care and they don’t have full knowledge why stuff is required - which is fault of managers that are not training their people and explaining “why”.
Oh and of course they have to copy paste shit over and over because their company won’t have budget for us integrating with their CRM and we won’t invest in something that benefits only single customer who might not renew the license next year - but also they don’t want to make a commitment like 5 years contract where we could do some investment. Of course there are some that invest in connecting the CRM but it mostly is an exception rather than the rule.
Enterprise software is also particularly bad because many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want. Leading to a million weird functions, toggles, configurability because some manager in charge of making a big purchase demanded that first it must do X, many of these features left with not even a single user after the original requester leaves. While consumer software the individual consumers just get what they are given, and a single product manager/team decide what's best.
>many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want
This here so much. When some group paying you millions is saying they want a feature or they will look at competitors all kinds of crap ends up in the software.
Right, and then you also have public sector software, and transnational software generally, where the provider actually needs to cater to a plethora of rules and regulations.
Consumer software can be good, but it's often also optimized for max engagement, not for the actual value or functionality.
Enterprise software can be because there isn't an incentive mismatch, good solution is more valuable for the customers, it will sell better and they're willing to pay for it.
But like you say, lot of enterprise software is bad because it's optimized for the payer, not the user, and it's often shoehorned to weird workflows of the particular enterprise.
I think we should embrace AI to craft better software. You have a lot of control over the code generated by AI, so all your designs, patterns, best practices can be used in the generated code. This will make us better software craftsmen.
A nice example is guitar building: there's a whole bunch of luthiers that stick to traditional methods to build guitars, or even just limit themselves to japanese woodworking tools.
But that is not the only way to build great guitars. It can be done by excellent luthiers, building high quality quitars with state of the art tools. For example Ulrich Teuffel who uses all sorts of high tech like CAD systems and CDC machines to craft beautiful guitars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLZOxwmcFVo
Unfortunately, craftsmanship does not come cheap, so most customers will turn to industrially created products. Same for software.
But your comparison is a bit off; you mention CNC machines and the like to build guitars, but those are tools that are still exactly programmed by humans. LLMs on the other hand are probabilistic - you prompt "write me a set of gcode instructions for a CNC to build a guitar body" and wait / hope.
Sure, LLMs as a tool probably have a place in software development, but the danger lies in high volume, low oversight.
But there's people using it large scale to build large applications, time will tell how they work out in the end. Software engineering is programming over time, and the "over time" for LLM based software engineering hasn't been long enough yet.
You have a lot of control over what the LLM creates. The way you phrase your requirements, give it guidance over architecture, testing, ux, libraries to use. You can build your own set of skills to outline how you want the LLM to automate your software process. There's a lot of craftmanship in making the LLM do exactly what you think it needs to do. You are not a victim at the mercy of your LLM.
You are a lead architecture, a product manager, a lead UXer, a lead architect. You don't have 100% control over what your LLM devs are doing, but more than you think. Just like normal managers don't micromanage every action of their team.
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I agree. The article's logic is incoherent. It conflates the choice of tools with the decision what product to make and what level of quality to aim for.
If AI can be used to make bad (or good enough) software more cheaply, I have no problem with that. I'm sure we will get a huge amount of bad software. Fine.
But what matters is whether we get more great software as well. I think AI makes that more likely rather than less likely.
Less time will be spent on churning out basic features, integrations and bug fixes. Putting more effort into higher quality or niche features will become economically viable.
I don't get why the author assumes AI-assisted coding can never produce elegant software. I am learning new things from AI almost in every interaction.
I love the references to Jacques Ellul's ideas, which I think are interesting to reflect on in an AI age. It helps make clear that what is fundamentally at stake in much technological "progress" is an (often only tacitly acknowledged) sublimation of "efficiency" to the place of highest value.
What's fascinating is that this value elevation seems to have gone largely unchallenged, despite being in essence an arbitrary value choice. Other choices are possible. And, I hope, still are possible, despite what the bigcorps declare must be the case in order to maximize shareholder returns.
Efficiency is easy to measure. And whatever is measured becomes the goal.
It is harder to measure craft, care, or wonder. My best proxy is emails from real people, but those are sporadic, unpredictable, and a lot harder to judge than analytics screens that update every minute.
100%. This is what I posted about on Hacker News ([1] where it got no traction) and Reddit [2] (where it led to a discussion but then got deleted by a mod).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1qj03gq/wh...
Efficiency isn't even the best way to optimize for (expected) shareholder returns for an organization! Efficiency fundamentally trades-off against adaptability and resilience.
Yes, good point! Further underscoring the fetishistic nature of efficiency as highest value ;-)
> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code.
I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing.
Its still engineering work. The code still matters. Its just a different tool to write the code.
I'd compare the difference between manually coding and operating a coding agent to the difference between a handsaw and a chainsaw - the end result is the same but the method is very different.
> the end result is the same but the method is very different.
I dont think anyone really cares at all about LLM code that is the exact same end result as the hand written version.
It's just in reality the LLM version is almost never the same as the hand written version, it's orders of magnitude worse.
In the limited use cases I've used it, it's alright / good enough. But it has lots of examples (of my own) to work off of.
But a lot of people don't think like this, and we must come to the unavoidable conclusion that the LLM code is better than what they are used to, be their own code, or from their colleagues.
Speak for yourself.
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> Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing
Lots of times I could just write it myself and be done with it
Sure and lots of times I can walk places. That doesn't mean bikes, cars, trains and planes aren't incredibly useful. They let me achieve things I can't in other ways for example transporting cargo without a team of people to help me. Just like AI coding.
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>I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing.
Do you have any advice to share (or resources)? Have you experienced it yourself?
The practical limit is the latency and inference cost. A full planning and validation loop burns a lot of tokens, and waiting for that cycle breaks flow compared to just writing the code.
Only if your flow is writing the actual code.
If you flow state involves elaborating complimentary specifications in parallel, it's marvelous
> high quality code
What does high quality code look like?
> The code still matters.
How so?
Most software engineers were not “crafting” before AI. They were writing sloppy code for the sake of profit, getting a pay check, and going home. Which is why AI also outputs the same crappy code.
Rumor has it there were a few elite crafters among the lot. Software wizards who pondered about systems and architecture as they had a $10 espresso macchiato.
The AI code takeover will not free engineers up to do craftsmanship. It will annihilate the last vestiges of craftsmanship forever.
New technology does not eliminate old technology or craftsmanship. It just shifts who uses it and what for.
- Power tools didn't annihilate the craftsmanship of hand-tool woodworking. Fine woodworkers are still around and making money using hand tools, as well as hobbyists. But contractors universally switched to power tools because they help them make more money with less labor/cost/time.
- A friend of mine still knits on a loom because she likes using a loom. Some people knit by hand because they like that better. Neither of them stopped just because of large automated looms.
- Blacksmiths still exist and make amazing metal crafts. That doesn't mean there isn't a huge market for machine cast or forged metal parts.
In the future there'll just be the "IDE people" and the "Agent Prompt people", both plugging away at whatever they do.
You give examples where crafts based on pre-industrial technology still exist. You're right, but you're proving the GP's point.
200 years ago, being a blacksmith was a viable career path. Now it's not. The use of hand tools, hand knitting, and hand forging is limited to niche, exotic, or hobbyist areas. The same could be said of making clothes by hand or developing film photographs. Coding will be relegated to the same purgatory: not completely forgotten, but considered an obsolete eccentricity. Effectively all software will be made by AI. Students will not study coding, the knowledge of our generation will be lost.
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The examples given are using tools to do well-defined, repeatable processes. So far, despite many attempts by upper management to make software the same way, it hasn't happened, and AI doesn't appear to be any different.
I don't see a huge difference between people writing in a high-level language and people writing complex prompts.
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That's a very doomer statement, with the false premise that craftsmanship is already on its last vestiges. It's not that bad.
+1 for the mention of Forth. I use it often. LLM answers are possible now, but they are like translated C. It’s very bad style.
The standard: Forth words should be a few lines of code with a straightforward stack effect. Top level of a program might be 5 words.
LLM will generate some subroutines and one big word of 20-50 lines of nested IF..THEN..ELSE and DO..WHILE just as if it writing C.
I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant.
I remember when I first started out programming 20 years ago, there was time to craft good quality code. Then there were more and more pushes to get more code out faster, and no one really cared about the quality. Bugs became part of the cost of doing business. I think GenAI for code fits well in the more recent paradigm, and comparing it with hand-crafted code of yore is a bit disingenuous, as appealing as it may be, because most code hasn't been that good for a long time.
I am sad to admit it, but AI is just fitting in where poor coding practices have already existed, and flourishing in that local maxima.
Indeed this is offshoring taken to the next level.
Business doesn't care about the craft, they care that the use case is solved, even if the code is crap under the hood.
I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops.
But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers.
I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are learning to incorporate AI as a force multiplier.
Interesting times, ahead…
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As someone who resists agents, I agree with all of this 100%, especially that it's not said enough, because this is exactly what I've railed against most of my career. There is a HUGE "LOL all code sucks" sentiment across the majority of our industry and I friggin' hate it.
This really nails the core issue: AI thrives in environments where software is treated as “good enough” optimization rather than craft. It’s not replacing great engineers so much as exposing how much of modern software has already become rote, metric-driven work. The Arts & Crafts parallel feels especially apt as mass-produced code gets cheaper, human judgment and taste become the real scarce resources.
This argument is basically just the 1800s Luddite vs Industrialist argument recast for a new age. Group A thinks quality is about human agency, and that machines are being used to bypass the apprenticeship system and produce inferior goods. Group B thinks efficiency is the highest priority, and craft is just vanity. Of course as we know we went a third way, and human roles just shifted.
I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other.
sighs pulling out this quote again:
"Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to >>circumvent standard labor practices<< of the time."
Luckily, the brave government's troops, show trials and making '"machine breaking" (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime"' solved the crisis of these awful, entitled workers' demands once and for all and across all time.
I'm sure that any uppity workers in our present age can also be taught the appropriate lessons.
I wonder if the workers of the time were as responsible for the propaganda as we are... It seems like the ultimate heist when capital can get labour to propagate their own messaging.
Ordinarily yes I’d love to overthrow the bourgeoisie (check my history, I live in flagged threads), but this time I think this thread is really just about the evolution of the profession.
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The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:
> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.
It helps getting acceptance of talking to bots, when using voice instead of typing book sized prompts into tiny chat windows.
I dont think it's the same at all. when weaving was displaced, yes some people were pissed about losing their livelihood, but the quality of the cloth didn't diminish.
when CNC came for machining, no one really bitched, because the computers were just removing the time consuming effort of moving screws by hand.
when computers write code, or screenplays, the quality right now is objectively much worse. that might change, but claims that we're at the point where computers can meaningfully displace that work are pretty weak.
sure that might change.
Cloth absolutely has gotten worse over the last two hundred years since industrialization. It's also orders of magnitude cheaper, making it worth it, and certainly new types of cloth are available that weren't before, but we're not better off in every possible way.
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The result being worse generally doesn't stop humans from being displaced. Clothes made today are notably worse than the handmade ones.
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The available quality of cloth did, in fact, diminish.
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> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological.
Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market...
But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel like there isn't enough time anymore.
You talk to bots on Amazon? If say Hacker News was entirely just bots, why would you bother commenting, why would you bother reading the comments?
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It has nothing to do with luddites.
Software quality about speed of delivery and lack of bugs.
If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.
Ive yet to meet many AI champions who are explicit about their desire to make that trade off though. Even the ones who downplay software quality arent super happy about the bugs.
> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways, AI is totally fine.
While the speed and scale at which these happen is definitely important (and I agree that AI code can pose a problem on that front), this applies to every human-written piece of software I've ever worked on too.
> If you're fine with software which gets a little bit harder to work on every time you make a change and which might blow up in unexpected ways,
human written code is similarly fine. Save for very few human individuals.
Maybe kids will end up preferring to talk to bots, much like the generations after my own actually preferred digital compression artifacts in their music.
Can it get me a job if I get laid off (networking)? Can I crash on its couch for a while? It might displace tv/netflix, which yes is a huge market, but I don't think much more than that.
> It's biological.
Nonsense. We never evolved to send text messages and yet here we are with social networks, chat systems and emails used everywhere for everything.
AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones.
That's the problem.
Stop arguing about whether AI ruins craft. Fix the incentive structures so that increased productivity buys humans time, not disposability. Then see what kind of craft emerGe
Unfortunately it seems the incentive structures are ultimately set by global competition and the security dilemma. So short of total world disarmament and UBI, fundamentally the incentive will always be to work harder than your opponent to preserve your own security.
> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code.
As for lies and bad code, it didn't appear with AI. Humans lied and produced bad code before AI.
How does the author empirically know AI does not understand? And if it does not understand right now, is a machine fundamentally unable to understand? Is understanding an exclusive human ability? Is it because machines lack a soul? It sounds quite dualistic (Descartes'view that mind and body and fundamentally different).
Don't get me know, I think right now, AI is less a good at understanding humans than other humans (or even dogs) in many contexts because it has no access to non verbal signals. But in the context of building software, it is good enough and I don't see why a machine should not be able to understand humans.
I have had an interesting experience just recently.
I hired back on at a company I used to work at and found they had contracted work to another former employee who was handed the code from a rest api I had written and a web app that used it. The task was to write an android app that interacted with the api.
He ran it through an agentic coding assistant and got out api scaffolding and basic UI.
Looking it over, I couldn't shake the feeling I was looking at my code, just ported to kotlin. I was seeing my idiosyncrasies everywhere. It was kind of surreal.
I was familiar with the dev's work who did it and it was nothing like his prior work, but it's been years since I have seen him, so who knows.
I couldn't help but admit it was a good foundation to start building on.
I told the pm they were likely overpaying significantly for an agentic coding assistant and only getting access to it for a few hours a month. This same organization recoiled in terror when I pointed out the cost of a claude code subscription once.
AI wrote better code than most of my colleagues.
Especially with my rules:
- Prefer simple, boring solution
- Before adding complexity to work around a constraint, ask if the constraint needs to exist.
- Remember: The best code is often the code you don't write.
On a side track, I wish to express my fears regarding AI
Unfortunately for the general populace, most technological improvements in information technology, for the past 5 decades, has lead to loss of political control and lessened their leverage for political change.
With AI, this change is going to be accelerated a 100 times.
With current AI slop, and more importantly, almost indistinguishable from reality, AI based content, the populace is going slowly learning to reject what they see and what they hear from mass media.
AI has muddied the pool so much, that every fish, us, cannot see the whole pool. What this will lead to, is for political figures and bad actors to, much more easily almost with no effort at all, create isolation among people.
No event will create a mass uprising, because no event can be believed by a common mass. It will be easy to generate an alternative reality using the same AI.
Now, the political class and the billionaire class, are free to act with impunity, because the last check on their power, the power of mass media to form public opinion, to inspire the masses to demand change or accountability, has eroded to the point of no return. (They have already captured the institutions of public power)
I fear for the future of humanity.
Edit : There are already troubling signs from the billionaire class regarding this. There is a narrative to "ensure guardrails" for AI, sort of giving the populace the idea that once that is done, AI is acceptable. This is like saying, "better have a sleeve on the knife, so that no one can cut with it, but use it as a prop in a movie"
They are creating this narrative that AI is inevitable.
They are fear mongering that AI is going to take jobs, which it will, but it also goads the capable ones to get on to the bandwagon and advance AI further.
Mass media has been going to shit for a long time anyway. People have always chosen to believe tons of insane things.
AI will cause plenty of problems of course, because it puts a powerful tool in the hands of those who shouldn't use it, but also, many people shouldn't drive cars or use the internet.
AI is inevitable, just as calculators and computers were. I suspect that no humans will write code by hand in a not so distant future. The machines will be far too effective.
Personally, I love the acceleration we're seeing since the coming of computers. The internet is a big black mirror, scary, beautiful, and ugly, just like us. AI feels similar to me.
Will some things get worse because of AI? Probably. But maybe it'll also help to save us from ourselves. If nothing else, it will probably force some investment into long overdue security, identity, and trust issues.
What if AI starts to have sense of craft? we just miss the verify and critique models, that will tell other models what looks good
> People have said that software engineering at large tech companies resembles "plumbing"
> AI code [..] may also free up a space for engineers seeking to restore a genuine sense of craft and creative expression
This resonates with me, as someone who joined the industry circa 2013, and discovered that most of the big tech jobs were essentially glorified plumbers.
In the 2000s, the web felt more fun, more unique, more unhinged. Websites were simple, and Flash was rampant, but it felt like the ratio of creators to consumers was higher than now.
With Claude Code/Codex, I've built a bunch of things that usually would die at a domain name purchase or init commit. Now I actually have the bandwidth to ship them!
This ease of dev also means we'll see an explosion in slopware, which we're already starting to see with App Store submissions up 60% over the last year[0].
My hope is that, with the increase of slop, we'll also see an increase in craft. Even if the proportion drops, the scale should make up for it.
We sit in prefab homes, cherishing the cathedrals of yesteryear, often forgetting that we've built skyscrapers the ancient architects could never dream of.
More software is good. Computers finally work the way we always expected them to!
[0]https://www.a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-the-almighty-cons...
> joined the industry circa 2013, and discovered that most of the big tech jobs were essentially glorified plumbers
Most tech jobs are glorified plumbers. I've worked in big tech and in small startups, and most of the code everywhere is unglamorous, boring, just needs to be written.
Satisfaction with the job also depends on what you want out of it. I know people who love building big data pipelines, and people who love building fancy UIs. Those two groups would find the other's job incredibly tedious.
The right job for a person depends on whether they can rise above the specific flavor of pain that the job dishes out. BigTech jobs strike me as having an inextricable political element to them: so you enjoy jockeying for titles and navigating constant reorgs?
The pay is nice but I find myself…remarkably unenvious as I get older.
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Plumbing has certification and industry best practices, and its leaks generally affect a few blocks at most rather than spraying across the entire internet.
Er... we sit in prefab homes? Trailers are generally considered to be the worst possible quality of home construction and actually lose value instead of the normal appreciation real estate has.
The framing of craft vs. slop misses something important: most production software quality problems aren't about aesthetics or elegance, they're about correctness under real-world conditions.
I've been using AI coding tools heavily for the past year. They're genuinely useful for the "plumbing" - glue code, boilerplate, test scaffolding. But where they consistently fail is reasoning about system-level concerns: authorization boundaries, failure modes, state consistency across services.
The article mentions AI works best on "well-defined prompts for already often-solved problems." This is accurate. The challenge is that in production, the hard problems are rarely well-defined - they emerge from the interaction between your code and reality: rate limits you didn't anticipate, edge cases in user behavior, security assumptions that don't hold.
Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.
> Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.
That's why I'm of the opinion that for senior developers/architects, these coding agents are awesome tools.
For a junior developer? Unless they are of the curious type and develop the systems-level understanding on their own... I'd say there's a big chance the machine is going to replace their job.
Most people using LLMs dont have this craft...... which begs the question. Should they be using LLMs in the first place? Nope. But given that its rammed down their throat by folks internally and externally, they will.
[flagged]
something incredible just happened, I was moving in my bed and somehow pressed the hotkey combination for reader mode on my keyboard, which centered everything nicely for me
had no that feature existed in firefox
It’s easy to forget that any artifact - painting, music, text, or software - that appeals to a large number of people is, by definition, an average on the spectrum of quality.
Popular music tends to be generic. Popular content is mostly brainrot these days. Popular software is often a bloated mess because most users’ lives don’t revolve around software. They use software to get something done and move on.
I never understood the appeal of “craft” in software. Early computer pioneers were extremely limited by the tech of their time, so the software they hacked together felt artsy and crafty. Modern software feels industrial because it is industrial - it’s built in software factories.
Industrial software engineers don’t get paid to do art. There are research groups that do moonshot experiments, and you can be part of that if it’s your thing. But lamenting the lack of craft in industrial software is kind of pointless. Imagine if we’d stopped at crafty, handmade auto engines and never mass-produced them at scale. We don’t lament “crafty engines” anymore. If you want that, go buy a supercar.
Point is: AI is just another tool in the toolbox. It’s like Bash, except calling it that won’t pull in billions of dollars in investment. So “visionaries” call it ghost in the machine, singularity, overlord, and whatnot. It produces mediocre work and saves time writing proletariat software that powers the world. Crafty code doesn’t pay the bills.
But I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek out fun in computing. We absolutely should. It’s just that criticizing AI for not being able to produce art is an old thing. The goalpost keeps shifting, and these tools keep crushing it.
I don’t use AI to produce craft, because I don’t really do craft in software - I have other hobbies for that. But I absolutely, proudly use it to generate mediocre code that touches millions of people’s lives in some way.