Comment by applfanboysbgon
5 hours ago
> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...
Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
Custom furniture/cabinetry is already a pretty tough market, and woodworking is such a common programmer hobby that if a significant chunk of us decided to make a go of it the market would get heavily oversupplied pretty fast :).
I’ve had people tell me I should try selling some of the furniture I make and my response is always that I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career once, I don’t intend to make that mistake again, and at least software still pays pretty well.
I'm threading this now and have paired AI-assisted development with woodworking knowledge. Partially chose to work on this because I wanted to build in a domain that the models might have a tougher time understanding.
Parallels and interests overlap everywhere between programming and woodworking; decisions about tooling, tolerances, sequencing, and what can be easily fixed later.
The models get rectangles pretty well and has been fun exploring a parametric casework planner for my own shop.
Depends what you mean by woodworking
I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)
Most people would just call that construction
Specifically a carpenter.
Construction working entirely with wood
If only there was another word for that...?
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I have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.
You assume there are enough of these jobs to go around and that you can just show up and do some extremely intricate work. Repairing historic doors and more elaborate woodworking isn’t easy to learn as the knowledge mostly doesn’t exist online anywhere, I also own a historic house and often ask the top tier LLMs for details e.g. about my staircase, they always give wrong answers as this knowledge is simply too exotic and not in their training set. And no one online talks about these things, 99 % of woodworking videos on YouTube are focus on beginners, you can’t replace a professional education watching videos and reading books. That will protect woodworkers with these skills of course but it’s wrong to assume you can just break into this market and be successful, most devs with woodworking hobbies are really shit at their craft and struggle to create even a regular elaborate cabinet, no way they will be able to compete with good craftsmen for these few lucrative projects.
you need some explicit /s in there, i'm afraid it's too dry
You paid $4k because it's a niche task that isn't much in demand.
look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill.
not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.
My comment was about the fact that even if you're laid off, you're more likely to find success in artisanal software than artisanal woodworking. That statement is not an assertion that you're guaranteed success, just that it's more likely to sustain yourself than woodworking is.
Layoffs also don't really tell you anything. Is it actually LLMs that are causing layoffs or is it deteroriating economic conditions and uncertainty amidst war, oil shocks, etc.? Is it junior employees being laid off, or seniors? If it's the former, someone with 10+ years of professional experience might not have reason to be concerned. I happen to believe that, LLMs or not, the software development field already had far too many jobs, employing a large number of clueless people who contributed somewhere between zero and negative value to their organizations, and that it was overdue for a correction anyways.
true, agree on later point.
but for "woodwork" / personal-farm still belive he is better off than software. at least he will be employed and have food on the table.
You are not allowed to have land without participating in the economy. The government forced you to acquire land by buying it, and to pay taxes in dollars.
I mean you can sell surplus to market. but key point you do not pay taxes on food you grown on your backyard and eat yourself! nor you are subject to any market collapse. as long as sun shines and raind pours, your food grows in your backyard, no matter S&P or inflation rates.
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> get a pot of land and grow your own food
Rejecting industrialized society is actually very expensive
"industrialized society" just rejected 160,000 sofware engineers this year. other industries are no better. you are either wage-slave barely making it. or getting laid off, as those people are not needed.
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Artisanal food for hipsters is always going to be a market. People are willing to pay a premium for locally or regionally grown produce, fruit, eggs and meat.
However, it's a risky business so I'd only recommend getting started if you either (!) are FIRE already even after sinking 3 million bucks into purchasing land and machinery as well as constructing all the buildings or if you join a cooperative/union or if you got experienced farmers in your family.
Everything else - especially following "prepper" influencers shilling books and holding more public speeches to shill for said books than they are actually working on their farm - is a recipe for certain disaster.
If in doubt... first try raising a few dozen chickens in your yard as a starting point.
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> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe).
Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
You took this statistic out of your rear end?
It is fairly obvious that the majority of people who buy software (>99%) don't really care how it's built. They care a lot about the outcome of using it, they care a little bit about whether there are bugs or not, and they care about the cost a lot, but beyond that nothing seems to matter to the purchaser. Even obvious things like whether or not there are tests, documentation, SLAs for fixes, or backwards compatibility between versions don't really seem to matter much.
That doesn't mean you couldn't carve out a niche providing hand built software to people it does matter to, because the software industry is large, but saying 'zero percent of the market isn't willing to pay for it' isn't really wrong. It's just a rounding error that does care.
(One massive caveat though ... the argument assumes that 'hand built' means 'higher quality than AI-assisted', and that's probably not true for >99% of developers.)
> You took this statistic out of your rear end?
We are less than a year into good-enough coding agents, and as of right now there is not a single job opening I see that offers a salary for non-AI output.
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> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
This is a provably false statement, given that eg. Handmade Hero exists and sold a bunch of pre-orders despite never coming close to completion, and spawned an entire community that prides themselves on handmade software. There are also content creators like Tsoding who make a living by having people watch them do handmade coding for the love of the craft.
Some non-zero percentage of people will also always be willing to pay a premium for superior-quality software. The author's thesis isn't that LLMs can produce S-grade software but that 'nobody cares' about quality and that C-grade software is good enough. While it's true that software quality isn't greatly valued at scale, I think the minority who care is larger than the minority who care about premium woodworking goods, particularly because as an artisan software developer you more or less have access to the global market of every single person who cares, while as an artisan woodworker you mostly only have access to the market of people in your town who care.
This also overlooks that LLMs are politically divisive and there are movements to boycott them and shame people for using them. There's a niche for organic, free-range, vegan, etc. products at the supermarket for conscientious objectors, there will undoubtedly be such a niche for software. All the more so if LLMs reach a point where they actually are putting everyone out of a job, they will get much more divisive. There was already an assassination attempt against Altman and his promises to destroy everyone's livelihood haven't even come to fruition.
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.
I think this can happen in technical communities - people who can write/read/understand code. Who really cares about software size/performance/usability/minimalism.
This is a small part of the whole users, but.. why not. People who value hand-by wood goods are also a small part.
Also, there are also communities which slow down AI integration - like Zig. Maybe they will alive
No it won't. Everyone knows their favourite film director.
Virtually nobody has their favourite app developer.
Only if the quality is bad. And users normally can only judge this when something is not working. So maybe only badly written/tested software will get labeled ai slop.
People can’t even reliably recognize AI art anymore.
The classic “AI images were everywhere in 2023, but I rarely see them now” phenomenon.
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