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Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

cekrem.github.io

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Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#81

Post by skydhash »

amoss wrote: post #76
codr7 wrote: post #65

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…

It reminds me of the Hamming quote: "I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. H…

That's a nice quote. And your comment reminds me of why I (and maybe some other people) prefer windows managers over desktop environments. You go with the basic and everytime you notice some missing capabilities or inefficiency, you code it away. The end result is something that fit you like a glove and you understand thoroughly. It's 100% your own.

But with DE, you need maybe 80%, and the 20% you build with workarounds is constantly under threat. Why, because you're effectively enclosed in a small space by the design decisions of the DE.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#82

Post by skydhash »

bayindirh wrote: post #75
skydhash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder if people truly learned their IDE. Even xCode with all its warts have nice feature for completion, debugging, profiling, documentation,… It seems like all they know is VS Code which is neither a good editor, nor a good IDE.

From my experience, people are really wary of learning the tool they're using to code, because any editor similar to VSCode fulfills their needs. However, as you said, mastering a proper IDE is a superpower and allows much more to be done in a single window in a shorter amount of time. Also, since VSCode is everywhere, getting people off of it, or showing much capable software is a sad and moot effort, from my experi…

> Also, since VSCode is everywhere, getting people off of it, or showing much capable software is a sad and moot effort

The issue is that they're not learning VS Code. They install a lot of plugins, but they're not really learning them. I've seen people that still go through the explorer to open a file.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#83

Post by skydhash »

spacemadness wrote: post #79

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 engineer…

> “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?”

That's the reason I tried to have most of my communication (and complaints) in written and auditable form.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#84

Post by [deleted] »

codr7 wrote: post #65

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…

[deleted]

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#85

Post by o1o1o1 »

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.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#86

Post by boredemployee »

lm28469 wrote: post #59
bovermyer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about…

Hate it all you want, the vast majority of "programmers" aren't working on anything novel, meaningful or hard. For the vast majority of people it's just a job, it's not a hobby, it's not a passion, it's not something they dream about, it's just a thing that they have to do 8 hours a day to make money and go do stuff in the real world. They don't want to think about it on walks, they don't want to cry about it, they d…

In other words, for the vast majority of people: work (code) or starve to death.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#87

Post by ferguess_k »

rco8786 wrote: post #20
ericyd wrote: post #17

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.

This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).

I think Copilot (and all other AI coding variant) is different from auto-complete. Auto-complete just give you function names, variable names, but AI coding can write whole block or even file of code, if you so wish.

By the same principle, I also think advancement in AI is different from other technological advancement. Even the invention of computer is at most on par with AI if AI is able to walk far. People always try to use the train-horse analogue but I think we will see a gloom future in the next 5-10 years -- especially when the whole world is not turning to the left, but to the right.

Now that US and China and everyone else are competing on AI, that future might come earlier than I thought.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#88

Post by bovermyer »

lm28469 wrote: post #59
bovermyer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about…

Hate it all you want, the vast majority of "programmers" aren't working on anything novel, meaningful or hard. For the vast majority of people it's just a job, it's not a hobby, it's not a passion, it's not something they dream about, it's just a thing that they have to do 8 hours a day to make money and go do stuff in the real world. They don't want to think about it on walks, they don't want to cry about it, they d…

There is nothing wrong with people wanting to just be able to afford food, shelter, and comfort.

However, if people are writing software that other people rely on, there has to be some expectation of quality. Software that controls a machine responsible for keeping someone alive, for instance, should function reliably.

Relying on AI to vibe-code such software is dangerous at best.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#89

Post by PyWoody »

beej71 wrote: post #60
kevmo314 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do read the docs a lot less now though with IntelliSense, so if my craft were reading and understanding docs I'd probably be measurably disappointed by this future.

Aside: I can't stand popups when I'm coding. I always have to change it to something more manual or it just breaks up my flow. ^K to bring up a man page from vim is great--that's what I'm after.

There are dozens of us!

I never understood how people could maintain focus while their cursor is jumping around and things are flying across the screen. I can type 90+ wpm, I don't need help typing.

Re: Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym

#90

Post by ericyd »

mvieira38 wrote: post #35
rco8786 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).

Overreliance on intellisense does worsen your abilities, though, especially when dealing with complex packages and APIs. So does stack overflow. In my domain of data science and finance, it is VERY noticeable when someone doesn't actually understand how Pandas and Numpy work, for example, and how to write good vectorized solutions to their problems

You might be right that intellisense is to blame, but my suspicion is that some people are just worse at writing code and it isn't really about the available tools.
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