Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me.

Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction.

Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill.

Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there.

Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp.

Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain.

Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead.

Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...

My anxiety for where this is all going is as follows. Using AI for all your coding is a wet dream for CEOs because the goal is to fire all their engineering staff except for a handful of maintainers. However, it reminds me of trying to explain to your stakeholders why you need time to work on tech debt before it becomes a problem. There is no metric now that says there is a problem that’s easily measured but engineers are grinding their teeth trying to work within a system that is slowly degrading and is showing signs.

“Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?”

Likewise, the brainrot and lost knowledge, as well as possible new tech debt that fewer engineers working in their codebase understand, will eventually cause issues down the line. The same pressures will ensue causing stakeholders to ignore all the signs of degradation.

I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.

Really interesting and I agree with everything. With my team we always try to improve our programming skills without AI, even though we all recognize its great utility.

Today every type of problem and every type of solution seems to have to be solved with AI, when there are more creative, original and artisanal ways to solve them (even if, sometimes, they need more time and patience)

Very good article. I try to (respectfully) push my coworkers in this direction but it’s a bit of a lost cause.

I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors.

People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.

I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them.

Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction.

But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails.

Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.

This reminds me that I should do more coding challenges. Maybe nothing major, small data wrangling. Stuff like puzzles in the game Human Resource Machine. Advent of code light maybe. So refreshing and fun sometimes.

For me it’s not complicated when to use AI. If the task is something where having fluency will make me significantly more productive and nimble in the future, then I’ll go the old gym way.

It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.

"Generating boilerplate code, Summarizing documentation, Understanding complex concepts, Debugging tricky error messages, Drafting unit tests, Formatting data"

Thing is, this is probably 99% of the programming work of a junior dev at a place where management thinks like that.

> The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance. It implies delegating not just tasks but judgment itself.

Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant that phrase, but 'reflexive AI usage' has two conflicting meanings - it can be AI usage that is either actively or passively chosen - and we might need some better phrasing around this.

> If people stop the occasional deadlock of grinding teeth, looking at a problem, crying, going for a walk, praying and screaming until suddenly it makes sense (and you learn something!), I’d call it severe regression, not progress.

People for which development is not their job will absolutely want to get rid of it as much as possible because it costs money. I really agree with the author, it does feel like a regression and it’s so easy to overlook what makes the most part of the job when it looks like it can be fully automated. Once you don’t have people who are used to do what’s quoted, and there is 500 million lines of code and bugs, good luck with that to ask a human to take a look. Maybe AI will be powerful enough to help debugging but it’s a dangerous endeavor to build critical business around that. If for any reason (political or else) AI got more expensive it could kill businesses (twitter api ?)

>>It won’t design your domain layer with the care and consideration that >>comes from deep experience and hard-won knowledge.

What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.