>That's fine as a hobby, but it has massive drawbacks in a professional setting.
Here's the thing: I don't think so in the age of LLMs.
>I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees “steel” as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here
Like the common person vs. a metalworker thinking about steel I think we've all gotten this rigid view that software we work with is fixed and unchangeable and the LLM boom is going to change that by making ALL of the software we use "any shape we want".
I think libraries and open source software are going to have to move to looking more like building blocks with standards and instructions for modifications and people are actually going to DO those modifications to suit themselves instead of just being satisfied with whatever their SaaS providers want to give them.
And the pendulum of "we don't do it because it's not our core competence" is going to swing back to having developer tools teams that actually build and maintain developer tools.
The old advice about the time spend writing your tools is tempered by the fact that LLMs make it very very much easier for a focused smart team to build things.