I don't mourn our craft.
We mourn our craft
261–270 of 918 posts
Re: We mourn our craft
#262While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
Per the "About Me" picture, this particular technologist does not have any hair to tear out.
Re: We mourn our craft
#263This just in: people who expect things to stay the same should steer clear of careers in technology. Art, too, come to think of it.
LLMs and AI more broadly certainly seem to have upended (or have the potential to upend) a lot of white-collar work outside of technology and art. Translators are one obvious example. Lawyers might be on the chopping block if they don't ban the use of AI for practicing law. Both seem about as far as you can get from "careers in technology," and in fact writing has pretty much always been framed as being on the opposite end of the spectrum from tech jobs, but is clearly vulnerable to technological progress.
Right now I can think of very few white-collar jobs that I would feel comfortable training 4+ years for (let alone spending money or taking on debt to do so). It is far from a guarantee that almost any 4-year degree you enroll in today will have any value in four years. That has basically never before been true, even in tech. Blue collar jobs are clearly safer, but I wouldn't say safe. Robotics is moving fast too.
I really can't imagine the social effects of this reality being positive, absent massive and unprecedented redistribution of the wealth that the productivity of AI enables.
Re: We mourn our craft
#264I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have…
For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.
Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.
Re: We mourn our craft
#265> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…
Well said!
Re: We mourn our craft
#266While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
"We" might be such an industry, but I'm not. My focus has always been on creating new capabilities, particularly for specialists in whatever field. I want to make individuals more powerful, not turn them into surplus.
Re: We mourn our craft
#267I get the grief about AI, but I don't share it.
After ten years of professional coding, LLMs have made my work more fun. Not easier in the sense of being less demanding, but more engaging. I am involved in more decisions, deeper reviews, broader systems, and tighter feedback loops than before. The cognitive load did not disappear. It shifted.
My habits have changed. I stopped grinding algorithm puzzles because they started to feel like practicing celestial navigation in the age of GPS. It is a beautiful skill, but the world has moved on. The fastest path to a solution has always been to absorb existing knowledge. The difference now is that the knowledge base is interactive. It answers back and adapts to my confusion.
Syntax was never the job. Modeling reality was. When generation is free, judgment becomes priceless.
We have lost something, of course. There is less friction now, which means we lose the suffering we often mistook for depth. But I would rather trade that suffering for time spent on design, tradeoffs, and problems that used to be out of reach.
This doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels like the moment we traded a sextant for a GPS. The ocean is just as dangerous and just as vast, but now we can look up at the stars for wonder, rather than just for coordinates.
Re: We mourn our craft
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, on the surface it may seem like there’s nothing being created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software. At this point, most software you touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.
> every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software > The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering. Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts are telling you.
It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.
Re: We mourn our craft
#269There's a commercial building under construction next to my office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping young men are digging with their big excavators they've been using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer. Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.
Them using excavator and trucks etc to move dirt. Is the same as us using a compiler to compile code into an executable. LLM would be if the digging and hauling of the dirt happened without any people involved except the planning of logistics.
> LLM would be if
you'd sometimes discover a city communication line destroyed in the process; or the dirt hauled on top of a hospitals, killing hundreds of orphaned kids with cancer; or kittens mixed into concrete instead of cement.
And since you clicked "agree" on that Anthropic EULA, you can't sue then for it, so you now hire 5 construction workers to constantly overlook the work.
It's still net positive... for now at least... But far from being "without any people". And it'll likely remain this way for a long time.
Re: We mourn our craft
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).
I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus ( https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2... ), and it returned: > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates. --- Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would…
'multifarious uses' -> the implication would be having not just many but also a wide diversity of uses
M-W gives an example use of "Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality. — Matthew Korfhage, Wired News, 21 Nov. 2025 "
wordhippo strikes me as having gone beyond the traditional paper thesaurus, but I can accept that things change and that we can make a much larger thesaurus than we did when we had to collect and print. thesaurus.com does not offer these results, though, as a reflection of a more traditional one, nor does the m-w thesaurus.