Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

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.

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.

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.

This article really hit home—especially this part from the conclusion:

> In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft. > ... > Like Rocky, we sometimes need to step away from the comfortable, civilized environment and return to the old gym – the place where real growth happens through struggle, persistence, and focused practice.

> Because coding isn’t just about output. It’s about the journey of becoming better problem solvers, better thinkers, and better engineers. And some journeys can’t be outsourced, even to the most advanced AI.

But here’s the reality: those ideals feel increasingly out of reach. Business demands and short-term thinking rarely leave room for “intentional” or “thoughtful” work. For many of us, having time to grow as engineers is a luxury.

Worse, it’s often personal. I’ve had to carry the weight for friends in crisis, pretending two people were working just to help someone keep their job. It’s brutal—and sadly, not rare.

As AI gets more buzz, many stakeholders now think our work is overvalued. A quick AI PoC becomes “good enough” in their eyes, and we’re expected to polish it into something real—fast, cheap, and under pressure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly defending our craft against the next threat of being replaced by “cheaper” labor.

When I started out, we cared about clean code and craftsmanship. Now, I feel like I should be taking sales courses just to survive.

Today, it’s all about output. Ship faster or get replaced. Quality only matters when it’s too late—after the person who made the bad call has already cashed out.

I know this sounds pessimistic, but for many of us who aren’t in the top 1% of this industry, it’s just reality.

Thanks for the article, Christian. You’re not wrong—but I think you’re one of the few lucky enough to live that perspective. I wish you all the best, and hope you can keep enjoying that rare luxury. There will be a need for true craftsmen—especially when the rest of us have gone numb just trying to keep up.

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.

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.

"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 ?)

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)

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"