Comment by slotrans
17 hours ago
The AI code takeover will not free engineers up to do craftsmanship. It will annihilate the last vestiges of craftsmanship forever.
17 hours ago
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.
I know people who make their living doing those niche things. So what if they're niche? Enterprise Software Architect is niche. Aerospace Engineer is niche. Hell, finding somebody under the age of 40 who can write Assembly is niche.
Everything gets worse overtime. Even before AI, I was constantly complaining about how technology is enshittifying. I'm sure my parents complained about things getting worse, and their parents. Yet here we are, the peak achievement of living beings on this planet, making do. I think we will be OK without typing in by hand a thing that didn't even exist 70 years ago.
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I doubt hobbyists would describe their hobby as purgatory.
I doubt the laborer would describe their toil as "craft".
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I don't think that's a good comparison though. We shouldn't compare AI/Software to handcrafting one item, you should compare to handcrafting the machine that crafts the items.
If I knit a hat, I can sell it once, but if I make a game, I can run or sell it repeatedly.
However, I still agree with the outcome - if AI becomes even better and is economically viable - number of people handcrafting software will reduce drastically.
> Effectively all software will be made by AI. Students will not study coding, the knowledge of our generation will be lost.
Given the echo chamber of HN when it comes to AI that certainly seems inevitable. The question is - who would work on novel things or further AI model improvements if it so happens that knowledge of writing software by hand disappears?
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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.
As someone coding since 1986, I certainly see it on the time to get something done.
AI agents isn't coding in Common Lisp home made macro DSL, is me doing in one hour doing something that could have taken a couple of days, even if I have to fix some slop along the way.
Thus I can already see the trend that started with MACH architecture and SaaS products, to go even further decreasing the team sizes required for project delivery.
Projects I used to be part of a 10 people team, are started to be sized into 5 or less.
That's a very doomer statement, with the false premise that craftsmanship is already on its last vestiges. It's not that bad.