Comment by hackyhacky
18 hours ago
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.
> So what if they're niche? Enterprise Software Architect is niche.
It's a question of supply and demand in the labor market. Right now, we are paid well and afforded respect because demand for our service is higher than the supply. When anyone can use AI to do our job, the supply will exceed the demand.
There are blacksmiths still working today. Their work is niche. And although blacksmithing today requires no less skill than it did 200 years ago, there is significantly less demand, and very few can make a living at it.
I doubt hobbyists would describe their hobby as purgatory.
I doubt the laborer would describe their toil as "craft".
> I doubt hobbyists would describe their hobby as purgatory.
Programmers have become accustomed to a lot of cultural and financial respect for their work. That's about to disappear. How do you think radio actors felt when they were displaced by movies? Or silent film actors when they were displaced by talkies?
> I doubt the laborer would describe their toil as "craft".
Intellectual labor is labor. I'm a laborer in programming and I definitely consider it a craft. I think a lot of people here at HN do.
And they were and are of course right to feel those feelings, but it doesn't change the fact that the world is changing. Rarely do large changes benefit everyone in the world.
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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?
A selected few, just like some mechatronic engineers get to develop new factory robots, and a few lucky ones stay around to do the manual tasks they still can perform or press the big red button when something goes wrong.
I can answer your question in two ways:
1. AI will work on AI. 2. People will work on AI, but as a rare niche, not a mainstream area of software development.