Grief and the AI split

I think the article misunderstands completely. "Craft" coders are chasing results too — we're just chasing results that last and that can be built upon. I've been in this game for a while, and a major goal of every single good programmer I've known has been to make themselves obsolete. Yes, I enjoyed meticulous hand crafted assembly, counting cycles and packing bits, but nobody had to talk me into using compilers. Yes, I've spent many fruitful hours writing basic CRUD apps but now that's easily done by libraries/frameworks I'm not eager to go back. Memory management, type systems, higher level languages, no-/low-code systems that completely remove me from some parts of the design loop, etc etc etc. All great: the point of computer programming is to have the computer do things so we don't have to.

I think the real divide we're seeing is between people who saw software as something that is, fundamentally, improvable and understandable; and people who saw it as a mysterious roadblock foisted upon them by others, that cannot really be reasoned about or changed. And oddly, many of the people in the second category use terminology from the first, but fundamentally do not believe that the first category really exists. (Fair enough; I was surprised at the second category.) It's not about intelligence or whatever, it's a mindset or perspective thing.

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored them or created conditions for their success and growth.

This sounds right to me:

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

Helps explain why some people are delighted to have AI write code for them while others are unhappy that the part they enjoyed so much has been greatly reduced.

Similar note from Kellan (a clear member of the make-it-go group) in https://laughingmeme.org/2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-the... :

> That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

> I grieve for the web I've known. Not for writing HTML by hand, but I grieve for the open web as an ecosystem.

These seem more related than is stated. Shifting creation from individual people to corporate-owned AI tools is another step from being able to write it yourself in the common venue of the web, to being forced to either submit to owned tools or be relegated out of the mainstream.

We're still in a sort of purgatory between the two, but the DIY web is creeping into the rear view, and every moment of proprietary generative AI adoption accelerates it.

I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers.

It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result.

I don’t care about the beauty of the code, but I do care that nearly every app I load takes longer than it did 15 years ago. I do care that my HomePod tells my wife it’s having trouble connecting to iPhone every 5th time she adds something to the grocery list. I care that my brokerage website is so broken that I actually had to call tech support who told me that they know it’s broken and you have to add a parameter to go back to the old version to get it to work.

I care that when I use the Claude desktop app it sometimes gives me a pop up with buttons that I can’t click on.

I’ve used Claude and Cursor enough to have what I think are valid opinions on AI assisted coding. Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product. Understanding the problem is the biggest bottleneck. Knowing what to build and what not to build. The next big one is convincing everyone around you of that (sometime this takes even more time). After that, it’s obsessively spending time iterating on something until it’s flawless. Sometimes that’s tweaking an easing value until the animation feels just right. Sometimes that’s obsessing over performance, and sometimes it’s freezing progress until you can make the existing app bulletproof.

AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.

It does help crank out one off tools. It does help me work in unfamiliar code bases, or code bases where for whatever reason I care more about velocity than quality. It helps me with search. It helps me rubber duck.

All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.

The optimal amount of generative AI in the world is zero. There are three possible scenarios, all of them bad:

1. Weaker than expected AI.

Great Depression 2.0. Widespread poverty and suffering as the enormous investments already made fail to pay off.

2. AI works as expected.

Dystopia. A few trillionaires gain absolute control of the entire world, and everyone else is enslaved or killed.

3. Stronger than excepted AI.

Hard take-off singularity scenario. Extinction of all biological life.

It's probably hopeless to resist at this point, but we should at least try.

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand.

I would argue that the split existed before AI and these camps were not the same.

There were always "Quality first" people and "Get the shit done ASAP" people. Former would go for a better considerations, more careful attitude towards dependencies. Latter would write the dirty POC code and move on, add huge 3rd party libs for one small function and so on.

Both have pros and cons. Former are better in envs like Aerospace or Medtech, latter would thrive in product companies and web. The second cathegory are the people who are happy the most about AI and who would usually delegate the whole thing to the agents from start to finish including the review and deployment.

You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.

The consumer/producer dichotomy misses another aspect of coding, with or without AI.

About a decade ago, STEM education was trendy and everyone was getting Lego, Raspberry Pi etc to build robots and writing Python in the name of STEM. You can ask LLM what STEM standards for.

The Maker movement is not about consuming or producing for consumption. Some people might get incentive to be influencers and profit off it. But the majority of the kids who went through this process become adults and moved on to be producer/consumer and playing with AI now. I believe their curiosity and creativity.

Don’t worry, life will find its way.

I suppose I see the split a little bit differently. To me it's more that one camp of developers can still get a hit of satisfaction as if they built something themselves even if it was entirely generated by AI.

Would they get the same satisfaction from cloning a public repo? Probably not. It's too clear to their brain that they didn't have anything to do with it. What about building the project with cmake? That requires more effort, yes, but the underlying process is still very obviously something that someone else architected, and so the feeling of satisfaction remains elusive.

AI, however, adds a layer of obfuscation. For some, that's enough to mask the underlying process and make it feel as if they're still wielding a tool. For others, not so much.

There's two kinds of developers. The first one would never become a manager because they like coding too much. The other one would become a manager at the first opportunity. It is obviously the second group that is benefiting from AI the most (because not everybody can be a manager).

> These are real feelings about real losses. I'm not here to argue otherwise.

I'll argue it. Technically, there's no loss IMO, only gain. Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them.

But now result chasers can get results faster in their chasing. Or get results at all. I'm a proud result chaser now making serious progress on various projects that I've had on ice anywhere from months to years and occasionally lamented not having time/energy for them. And I also note my stable of tools, for both AI-related dev and other things, has grown greatly in a short period of time. And I'm loving it.

For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm working at now gets automated too?

I'm a bit in the middle. I enjoy the craft but I also seek and enjoy the result.

The thing about AI is that you don't have to use it for everything. Like any other tool you can use it as much as you'd like. Even though I like the craft, I find myself really enjoying the use of AI to do things like boilerplate code and simple tests. I hate crafting verbose grunt work, so I have AI do that. This in turn leaves me more time to do the interesting work.

I also enjoy using AI to audit, look for bugs, brainstorm, and iterate on ideas. When an idea is solid and fleshed out I'll craft the hard and interesting parts and AI-generate the boring parts.

After years of working at startups I’ve long since abandoned any notion of craft at work. I have developed a very keen sense for harmfully cutting corners though, and unreviewed AI code (or unreasonably large PRs - defined by a size you can’t comfortably review) is absolutely cutting corners. It’s nothing to do with craft and everything to do with both correctness and incurring massive amounts of future debt.

There are far more divides than just that one.

For instance, the ones that look at it from an economics perspective, security perspective, long term maintainability perspective and so on. For each of these there are pros and cons.

Having managed developers for over five years, I have seen two categories of devs (to simplify the argument, let's focus just on the smart ones):

- one group loves to work independently and gets you the results, they are fast and they figure things out

- second group needs direction, they can be creative in their space but check-ins and course corrections are needed.

AI feels like group1 but it's actually group2. In essence, it doesn't fully fit in either group. I am still figuring out this third group.

I'm a craft lover but I like using the Ai for tedious tasks. Just today it tracked down a library conflict in a pom that from experience would have taken a day of trial and error.

It kinda reminds me of the first time I visited a maker space years ago. It was full of cutting edge lasers cutters, 3-D printers, oscilloscopes. I’m doing the tour they told us we could make anything. Then the tour ended. I get to meet the real users and they showed me what they made. Most people just made random things like etching Pokémon into their pencil case. I left thinking wow these people could make anything and that’s what they made. All I’m saying is if you give the average person something that Lockheed Martin is using to build the SR 71. The average person would probably just use it to make a toy car and that SR 71 is not going to get built.

That's an interesting take. I'm likely on the same side of the split as you, since I'm very much motivated by the new possibilities agentic coding tools open when used responsibly.

Back in February, I also wrote a piece on the recurring mourning/sense of grief we are seeing for 'craftsmanship' coding:

- https://thomasvilhena.com/2026/02/craftsmanship-coding-five-...

Author doesn't care about their blog writing as craft, either (it's been fed through an LLM.)

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages

Throughout college I would see a pretty stark divide, where most people would use vscode on mac or on Windows + WSL. But there was a small minority who would spend alot of time 'tinkering' (e.g, experiment with OS like nix/gentoo, or tweaking their dev environment). Maybe i'm misunderstanding what a 'craft lover' means here but it seemed to me, at the time, that the latter camp had more technical depth just based on conversation. Can't speak to the result in terms of test scores. Though it would be interesting to see any data on that if it exists.

I think there is a split but I don’t think it’s between people who love hand-crafting things vs not.

I love hand crafting things, yet I’m waking up like a kid on Christmas every day, running to my computer to use Claude code. For my critical apps I review every line. For 1-off things, I’ve had Claude build single-serving applications.

If I had to guess the split is more between folks who have curiosity about the new technology and folks who fear things changing. With a decent center on that Venn Diagram of folks who feel both.

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages,

Hell no. I, a craftsman, was going out of my way to use things like Haskell. I was very aware of the divide the entire time. The present is a relief.

I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. I use an iterative process. The implementation is the test of the requirements document. If it's not right, I adjust the doc, discard that implementation, and try again.

I think I'm in the middle, at first I was definitely against using any AI because I loved the craft. But over the past 12-18 months I've been using it more and more.

I still love to code just by hand for an fun afternoon. But in the long-term, I think you are going to be left behind if you refuse to use AI at all.

There’s a similar divide in the woodworking community between people that use CNC and the like to mill and shape wood vs those that use hand and power tools.

You can just turn the AI off. I think that's a good idea to do regularly, in the same way it's good to have some time every day without screens and internet in your life.

I did some "trad coding" to see how much I'd atrophied, and I was startled at how difficult and unpleasant it was. I was just stuck and frustrated almost the whole time! But I persisted for 7 hours and was able to solve the problem.

Then I remembered, actually it was always like that! At least when doing something unfamiliar. That's just what programming feels like, but I had stopped being used to it because of the instant gratification of the magic "just fix my problem now" button.

In reality had spent 7 hours in "learning mode", where the whole point is that you don't understand yet. (I was moving almost the whole time, but each new situation was also unfamiliar!)

But if I had used AI, it would have eliminated the struggle, and given me the superficial feeling of understanding, like when you skim a textbook and think "yeah I know this part" because you recognize the page. But can you produce it? That's the only question that matters.

I think that's going to become a very important question going forward. Sure, you don't need to produce it right now. But it's mostly not for right now.

Just like you don't "need" to run and lift weights. But what happens if you stop?

I think the split is between people who are in a hurry and those who are not. I'm not in a hurry and so choose not to spend money to get a quicker result.

Taking time to solve a problem myself is pleasurable and I make no apologies for that.

Horses for courses.

This resonates with me. I got into development exactly because I wanted to make things useful to me, with limited background in programming, over 20 years ago. Tech eventually got in the way. I was so bored with sandboxes, entitlements, signing apps, etc. The joy was gone. Now I am developing a new app with AI help. I may not be using the tools optimally but I don't care, it's a process. And it's a lie that this is a fast process. I have been working on one app for months, and now I have a pretty solid new app to show for it. Looking for MacOS Apple Music users for beta testers, BTW. Please have a look. https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html

I think it is counterproductive to bin people in two groups. It is more reasonable to accept that people's preferences differ by many dimensions.

We hear a lot from proponents of the most extreme standpoints, because those are easier to articulate, and lead to more engaged discussion.

A first stel could be to realize that most people just don't care, so there are at least three groups.

This resonates. I've noticed my own relationship with coding shifting in ways I didn't expect.

The grief isn't really about losing the craft—it's about losing the context where that craft made sense. When I started, "good code" meant something specific: elegant abstractions, clever patterns, the kind of stuff you'd show off in a code review. Now? The best code might be the prompt that gets an agent to write 500 lines of solid boilerplate in 30 seconds.

What's weird is I'm not even sad about it. I'm more... untethered? Like the identity I built around "being a good programmer" is dissolving, and underneath there's just... someone who likes making things work.

Maybe that's the real split: people who tied their identity to how they worked vs. people who tied it to what they built.

>I think recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the actually useful thing here. If you're mourning the loss of the craft itself—the texture of writing code, the satisfaction of an elegant solution—that's real, and no amount of "just adapt" addresses it. You might need to find that satisfaction somewhere else, or accept that work is going to feel different. Frankly, we've been lucky there's been a livelihood in craft up to now.

The blog post is all about being clear-eyed about the source of grief, but doesn't seem to articulate that it's the livelihood that's gone, not the craft. There's never been a better time to practice the craft itself.

The split is about people who care about the commerce behind software development vs people who care about the craft.

Commerce camp understands tradeoffs needed in a competitive environment. Cutting corners where possible, not being dogmatic about unit tests and clean code an so on.

If you notice - the craft people rarely think about commerce because coding is an artistic expression.

I like both worlds: Tinkering and vibe coding.

My shift in perspective is really: Not all code deserves to be hand-crafted. Some stuff can be wonky as long as it does it's job.

(And I think the wonkyness will reduce in vibe-coding as harnesses improve)

This reminds me of the divide between Role-players and Number-chasers in the once-upon-a-time MUD players communities.

People sure like manichaeism.

I wonder what happens if Claude was exploited by hackers and all chat logs were released one day.

Nearly every corp secrets would be instant leaked.

I don't know how I feel about this. I started programming in 1979.

I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result.

I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.

Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that.

Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests.

I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?

Are we 80% of the way there yet?

The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably not well-prepared for.

Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially more and better code than the people at my company spending all day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.

I just do not want to deal with other people's AI-generated code.

Before AI, as a head of product (who has always written code), I did this thing where when I was thinking through an idea or a product direction, I built the solution three or four times before I found the shape and direction that I liked. And once I liked it, I put it on a roadmap for one or more of my teams to execute on.

Candidly saying before AI is a little disingenuous, because since AI has gotten better in the last year at coding, my workflow has gone back to exactly what it was when I had a 40-person team reporting to me.

I still go through three, four iterations before a final direction is picked. It still takes me two, three weeks to think through an idea. Three things have changed.

1. When I think of a possible direction, a new version gets spun up within minutes to a couple of hours, usually in a single shot. 2. I can work through more big ideas which require some amount of coding-based ideation than I could previously. 3. And when a direction is decided on, the idea comes in to deliver the outcomes at a much quicker pace. Previously, it could have been 1 month of ideation + 2-8 sprints, now it's 2-4 weeks of ideation and 1-2 days to final delivery.

All in all, while I can see where the author is coming from, the grief has been different for me.

I've had a lot of good developers, product managers, product owners, and designers that have had the privilege of helping develop their skills in the past. That was the necessity of ensuring that we were developing talent who would then go on to produce good work on our teams.

And I'm at a stage now where a three-person team that I have can produce more than the 40 could, and I am likely never going to need to develop the skills the way I used to. The loss is not from coding, I thoroughly enjoy how that's evolved. The loss is from the white space around it.

Pointy haired bosses be looking for results.

Engineers be loving the craft.

It's a dance, but AI is unfortunately looking at us like we're dancing, and meanwhile it's built a factory.

The divide is a matter of perspective.

I'm a 23+ year dev; among the highest level ICs in my org.

It's still craft, its just that the craft is different. I don't write *.ts, *.cs files anymore; I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift every developers level up by several notches.

I went from building one kind of framework/platform level artifact to another type of framework/platform level artifact.

If one's perspective is that it's just a shift in what "craft" means, then it's still craft. I'm still building systems; just a different kind of system.

I think it's more granular than this, though. I also like to "make computer do thing" and have enjoyed using AI. But I also like building systems, optimizing systems. I find AI is a great partner in that. I can churn out prototypes more quickly, iterate on them more quickly etc. That also applies intra-system level. I might have a theory about how a different data structure or caching layer will affect application performance. It's now so much faster to test those kind of theories, and actually building good scaffolding around them to test them scientifically.

Yes, sometimes I can also ask AI to evaluate things at the system level and it often has surprisingly good insights, but that is usually a collaboration where our powers combined comes up with a better solution. I enjoy that process, too.

I do sympathize with the people "in mourning". I feel like this is really about how your identify is tied up in what you do. I have generally identified as a command line wizard. The xkcd of the guy flying in with "perl" very much speaks to me. But AI absolutely crushes at this. It's not that useful a skill anymore. Now I identify more as a local AI expert instead :D

This is the defining divide of AI, period. Whether you're a craft lover of art, writing, music, code, hell, business processes and the idea of "doing work." There are those who love the craft, and those who want the result of the craft. AI is a faster path to that end result (whether you're happy with that result is another matter). From that POV, it could lead to us speed-running our civilization into another era; abundant prosperity, or full on collapse. Bro...