Yet it seems to me that this is quickly becoming the stuff of an older generation, of people who move slowly, of a dying breed who care about silly things like craft and form.
Don't get me wrong--I'm all over AI, especially at work where speed also counts. But there's something so satisfying in writing code without AI that it makes me wonder if, in fact, I'm quickly becoming irrelevant.
Craftsmanship brings joy different from the one of productivity.
Not sure if because age, or because I use Ruby, a beautiful, terse language, but I like the process.
Often I close Cursor and fire up SublimeText for a simpler, quieter process.
If you get joy out of digging with your bare hands then you should do that. When you're doing work, use a shovel or heavy machinery if you want to get to the valuable output sooner.
In other words, there isn't always going to be room for craftsmen.
The 20th and early 21st century is the only time in human history when humans both 1) had machines that can make things and 2) the things machines made weren't better.
That's a blip. From now on, there'll be no comparison. The only reason to want something made by a craftsman is philosophical: "I want something markedly worse, but knowing it's been made by human hands".
And yes I’m old - 50. I started programming in assembly on the Apple //e in 1986 and haven’t written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for.
I'm in my mid-50s. I enjoy writing a simple utility function by hand. I care about craft and form.
But, I also care about increased productivity, exploring new technologies, and the wonders of AI.
Being into one doesn't negate the other.
I believe this says more about the tendency for our minds to close off to new ideas and stimulus as we get older. There's a reason that most people's "ideal era" is in their high school years.
I urge you to foster more resilience and adaptability and shun the traps of "back in my day-ism".
It's slow going, learning how to use a virtual assistant to get things done, but it's patient with me, as well. Eventually, however (and to stay relevant to the conversation here), I've started exploring how the code works, and fixing bugs on my own.
Once I get the framework to the point where anyone can try it out, I hope to then go through and understand every freaking line of code, and expand it from there. You're not alone in the desire to grok everything you write. There's a lot of power in that knowledge.
Then I'll re-implement it in Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS... just to prove a point. ;-)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If you can be twice as fast with something using AI and you're actively choosing not to use it, then yeah you're just being stubborn. Get over it or risk getting the boot.
There will be times though where you need to finish that last 10% of coding because the model just isn't refined enough for whatever task you're giving it. And from what I've experienced so far, that last 10% ends up being 70% of the work, which is where your expertise will come in.
For example, one instance for me was with winforms. I wanted to know how to recursively expand a list box. It's not a hard task, but it's just something that's tedious since I need to go research the documentation to see how a list box control actually behaves and what properties I need to manipulate. This is a very solved problem. What good is there in me re-solving it when someone has already done so?
That's where using AI is helpful without it being foolish.
There's no mention of that anywhere in the manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Specifically:
"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."
I guess there are religious texts, and then there are the interpretations of those texts.
But not yet
Everyone else will take the easy route -- higher immediate productivity but overall capable of less.
But then again I may be considered old, too (I'm in my 40s).
I don't think it's a great idea to become too reliant on it, just like it's not a great idea to only know how to copy+paste code from Stack Overflow. If you use it too much the coding muscle gets weak and you will become less able to identify when something is done incorrectly or in a less than ideal way because of this corner case or business requirement.
I just spent most of the day going back and forth with AI over stuff, and it kept getting more and more complex. Someone who didn't know any better would probably just take it and run with it, but I worked along with it, offering up more elegant suggestions to bring it back down to earth, where other people might be able to actually understand what it is trying to do.
I still get the most joy from writing tiny little scripts that help me (or others) do something useful.
PaulHoule•2d ago
zwilderrr•2d ago