Sounds to me like OP wanted to be the executive ordering his engineer team to build something rather than him being the engineer that actually builds it.
Also, "But clay didn't go away. Ceramics studios are everywhere now. People pay good money to throw pots on weekends.". What misguided statement. The population of full-time pottery workers didn't all open studios (likely a tiny percentage but it is more likely that the pottery studio people do not come from a pottery factory background) and those who opened them are likely not able to obtain a full-time equivalent level of income by catering to people like OP.
The article reads like a privileged person who lacks the ability to empathize with the disenfranchised.
I don't think you're right though.
Please consider the human next time :)
Instead of looking for why I'm wrong, look for why I'm right.
I have empathy for my fellow potters. But to deny the factory down the street exists is foolish.
To push <profession> the way of the potter is to commodify it, underpay the workers while draining the job of its craft and creativity. Then charge comparably wealthy people for the privilege of doing it for 2hrs a week as a recreational activity. A dozen people in major cities can get really good at it then have boutique studios where they charge wealthy people 100x the commodified price to be able to buy the same product but locally made.
We can't easily close Pandora's box of globalism and automation, but let's not glorify the destruction of craft and artisanship without recognition of the trade society made.
I guess it really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Pick a metric of your chosing if mine don't work. I'm just genuinely curious what capitalism alternative is best for creatives.
The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.
That's awesome, I've got to start playing around with r3f. It seems your repo's private btw
I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".
I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.
Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?
Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.
Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?
Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.
it's okay !
It's a bit more than it not doing it for me. I'm a bit tired of "AI and coding" takes over the past few years.
You are right. I don't have to agree and I don't have to be quiet about it. But it's going to be okay.
Because the transference of human intelligence is quite often done by analogy.
I'll attempt to explain.
From reading the article, I presume that at some point, all the people who think of code as clay will migrate out of this profession and set up shop in some mall somewhere helping married people renew their ties by making code artifacts by hand. As the article suggests, code (for them) will go the way that clay has went.
Also per the article, AI will be making some other portion of the low-hanging fruit code which business people can't justify hiring humans for.
And then perhaps there will be me and other people like me getting paid to work on things which require an understanding that code is quite unlike any medium humanity has seen before.
For the later group, code is not for everyone, it's beyond what AI can produce by itself, it's not a fetish, it's not cool, it's not fun, and it's one of the only ways to do the things we can do with it.
I sometimes think I'm addressing that later group of people when I type into this box, but maybe that's a bit naive of me.
It could have been safer for me to state that I find it unwise to make these analogies without being careful about the dangers in doing so.
Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".
Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!
As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."
It's easy to assume that because this person is a coder that they are also careful with logic, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
My take: clay coders are on the way out (or shape shifting) as AI becomes capable of writing code that can be thought of as clay. I hope to see you on the other side where we'll talk about systems that outpace the analogy.
emilsedgh•10h ago
A good chunk of our profession is just hype-followers at this point.
maegul•9h ago
But to be fair, I’m not sure what the average dev/eng is supposed to do against a climate of regular change, many disparate opinionated groups with disparate tech stacks, and, IMO a pretty ~~pure~~ poor engineering culture of actually weighing the value of tech/methods against relevant constraints and trade offs.
rickydroll•2h ago
Most of my understanding on type systems comes from taking a course on the calculation of programs from the author of this book.
To be blunt, this course and the understanding this book gave me crystallized why I was unhappy with the current state of software development and it was one more nudge pushing me out of the field. I caution others that reading and understanding this book may change your understanding of the software development world enough that you don't want to be part of it either.
Programming in the 1990s: An Introduction to the Calculation of Programs | Springer Nature Link (formerly SpringerLink) https://share.google/K81ZlVTbfoR2oeYLh