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.

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.

>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.

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.

I don’t think this split is fundamental or permanent.

Look at photography.

You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.

And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.

That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today.

It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders, jigs and other machines. It has also made me much better at building “we need this now” type things (decks, cabinets etc) with power tools in general. I am much more precise, sensitive, and detail oriented.

I hope and feel there is something similar with coding and LLMs. A way to repurpose that hard earned sensitivity and recover some of the zen aspects as well. I am still figuring that out, part of it has been tiring but honestly a lot of it has made programming more fun too.

The "it's my craft" developers seem to often disparage the "it's a means to an end" people as not being good at programming.

I guess there's a quota on HN where every day, some dev has to whinge about how AI is ruining The Way It Used To Be.

How is this post different than dozens that have come before it?

It's the same gnashing of teeth, just with different analogies each time.

One craft is automated and a new one is just beginning.

Building AI agents is really fun and the problem of having them be reliable adaptable efficient is actually really challenging and I'm having a lot of fun with it trying to figure it out.

To me it's a lot like factorio or my personal favorite Dyson sphere program where at first you do everything by hand and then you automate and then you automate the automation.

For the first time in human history we can automate intelligence with a computer but just because we can automate it doesn't mean all the good automation is good and we need engineers who can figure out how to automate it reliably scale it deploy it maintain it.

And yes eventually we will automate the automation too.

Craft is caring about the x in y = mx + b, while the so called "it's a means to an end" care about the y.

The difference between "craft lovers" and "doers" is that one operates at a better fitting abstraction (that is more aligned to the values of capitalism).

You can say "doers" are just "craft lovers" in and of itself - there is little distinction between them - this is just reiterating the change from binary to high level languages.