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fishtoaster • today at 7:21 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I'll miss the era when we could care about the craft of coding. I'll probably continue to do so in my spare time. Hobbyist woodworkers and hand-crafted furniture makers still exist, even if 99% of all chairs are made by machine now.

But code craft not the job. The job is to produce business value. Code craft used to aid that, but now it's an impediment.

Your job is no longer to produce code - it's to build systems that produce code. Tests and CI and Linters and custom lint rules and adversarial review and agent docs and automations and the next dozen tools we come up with as part of figuring out best practices around all of this. If you're getting woken up by agent-written code, the fix isn't to review every line of code - the fix is to improve your system so that class of error doesn't get written.

It's understandable if you don't want to do that work. It's almost entirely different from the work of reading and writing code. But if you don't, you're delivering less business value than someone who will. They don't employ hand woodworkers at Ikea.


Replies

batshit_beaver • today at 7:49 PM

I’m sure out of the many attempts to automate the production of software and get rid of those pesky, expensive devs, THIS one will work.

titzer • today at 7:25 PM

Tell me again how the code quality of the Linux kernel doesn't matter, only its business value.

bigstrat2003 • today at 7:37 PM

> But code craft not the job. The job is to produce business value. Code craft used to aid that, but now it's an impediment.

That is false. Code craft is still very much an aid to business value. If you just turn an LLM loose and don't review its work, you get a buggy mess over time. If you use an LLM, you must review and understand each line of code or you are sabotaging the quality of your work.

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