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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Writing code by hand" - more result oriented engineers became managers.

Editors - I don't believe Vim/Emacs used by both camps evenly.

Languages - in my field, most make-it-go people use Python and when large data is involved Python/Java with Hadoop. The craft-lovers prefer bespoke solutions when feasible, running it in a single box.

Version control - may be, but only after it got popularized by the GitHub.

Products - would make-it-go people ever create the 'git' in the form that made it a success?

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

And that once you fully lean into this part of software engineering, all the other stuff becomes interesting again. I highly recommend if anyone is demotivated from software engineering to write their own orchestrator or Ralph loop or sub agent system whatever it is that makes LLM actually work for you, exactly in the way you want it to work. And then to go back to your projects again. Because now the LLM is a part of you. It's no longer a vending machine, it's a gundam suit.

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 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.

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-...

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.

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.

Twelve years ago I would have the bright idea of why not make a little, just a tiny little (what I would call now) preprocessor for Java which does the same thing in less characters and is clearer. Everyone would love it. Of course no one loved it. Well, I never implemented it. Because I got some sense: you can’t just make tiny little preprocessors, a little code generation here and there, just code-generate this and tweak after the fact. Right? It’s not principled.

You can cook up a dichotomy. Good for you. I think the approach is just space age technology meets Stone Age mindset. It’s Flintstone Engineering. It’s barely even serious.

I am not offended that you took my craft. I am offended that you smear paint on the wall with three hundred parallel walls and painters and pick the best one. Or whatever Rube Setup is the thing that will take over the world as of thirty minutes ago.

Make something rock solid like formal verification with LLM assist (or LLM with formal verification assist?). Something that a “human” can understand (at this point maybe only the CEO is left). Something that is understandable, deterministic.

I might be out of a job. But I will not be offended. And I will respect it.

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 love shipping tangible products because it makes others happy and makes me money.

Do what you love for work and you'll never love anything again.

Do what you love for a hobby and keep it pure.

Don't let either be your identity, you only diminish yourself and grow old in the doing.

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?

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

Horses for courses.

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)

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?

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.

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.

Nearly every corp secrets would be instant leaked.

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.

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

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.

All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code!

This is going to blow up.

Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that version will still require crafters.

If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero. Everyone who's been around startup culture knows the running jokes about those 'I have a great idea, I just need someone to code it' guys. Now you're one, and you'll find how much ideas are worth.

I'm not sure what it is I'm supposed to be mourning. I'm using my skills and continuing in my craft the way I have for several decades and the way I will continue to for several more. I eschew the LLMs not because they are threatening to me, but because they are unsound products built & promoted by people who are fundamentally sociopathic.

If I am to mourn, I can mourn the unveiling of deep ethical lapses across the entire tech industry. They were clearly there already, we just didn't realize that if you were to put any random assemblage of techies into a room, a decent handful of them are sadly unethical people lacking a moral compass. We know that now. They love LLMs, because they love power and they dislike having to forgo perceived "utility" by recognizing the importance of caring for others in a community.

While they do their utmost to demolish craft & artistry & tradition, I will be doing my utmost to preserve & defend all of those things. I am no stranger to boycotts, and I certainly don't suffer from FOMO. And I'm thankful I know a whole lot of people who feel much as I do.

Brilliant engineers, among the best software craftsmen out there are using AI daily and speeding up their processes.

The author of Redis, antirez, stated a month ago he spent 2 weeks on Redis tinkering with LLMs...and it was just design phase, not a single line of code was authored. The ability to interrogate LLMs and have them criticize his ideas and edge cases sped up his process by month.

He also used LLMs successfully to find multiple issues in Redis that would've took him longer to do without.

I myself spend with AI way more time tinkering and gathering information than authoring code.

Am I a craft lover or a result chaser?

But sure, let's keep everything in the divide conservative vs liberal, black and white, craftsman vs vibe coder...give me a break..