Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

  * "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."

  * "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."

  * "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."

  * "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."

  * "Typing was never the hard part."

  * "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."

To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you need it.