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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

writings.hongminhee.org

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Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#2
The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it.

Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#3
post #2

The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#4
post #2

The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.

And like SEO blog spam it’s just going to grow in volume because people want to pad their CV’s with all sorts of activity in GitHub regardless of the quality

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#5
I've been feeling the craft side of this for the last few years. My education is in Fine Art and I am a self taught UI developer. To me this was a craft of making the code do what the designer envisioned and working with creatives to create engaging and unique interfaces. Slowly but surely "standardization" eroded this via bootstrap and material UI and interfaces lost that spark of creativity. This was the beginning of thinking of sites as products in my mind. LLMs are just the nail in this coffin. Since tools like Claude Code and Cursor have entered the market, I don't do tech in my free time anymore. I don't enjoy it now. I just use the LLM at work like the business dictates (and monitors) then clock out promptly at 5:00.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#6
>The market is penalizing them for it.

I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#7
post #2

The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.

This is the pattern. The labor is nearly worthless, so just have the bot reinvent the wheel every time.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#8
One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#9

>The market is penalizing them for it. I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.

If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#10

>The market is penalizing them for it. I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.

No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.
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