Comment by julienmarie

Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright etc... don't make buildings but design them. But the buildings are theirs, no question asked.

Steve Jobs created the Mac, the IPod, the iPhone. He didn't code or designed any of the PCBs.

Painters of the Renaissance had whole workshops with apprentices painting for them.

Creating a software is way more than just lines of code. It's understanding a market, a need or a want, it's marketing, it's copywriting. It's defining what to build, what not to build, and envisionning the final form of it.

Yes, the individual craftmen who worked on a Frank Lloyd Wright house can all be very proud of their work. They can say I built this roof. I built this wall. I built this waterfall. But the house is undeniably Wright's.

What we are all lamenting about is the fear of losing the monopoly of a craft. Which is legitimate. The same way furniture used to be hand crafted by skilled woodworkers, bespoke and expensively, have been replaced by IKEA. Now the skilled woodworkers left are now focusing on the high end of the market. The issue with programming is that clients are companies and the acceptance criteria are binary: does it work or not.