> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me.

I think we should move past this quickly. Coding itself is fun but is also labour , building something is the what is rewarding.

Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone.

That's the future for maybe half of programmers.

Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.

I understand the sentiment and I've been involved in software engineering in various roles for the last 25+ years. The thing that gives me hope is that never once in that time has the problem ever been that we didn't have more work to do.

It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm just getting a lot more done.

One other helpful frame: I consider LLMs simply to be very flexible high-level 'language' Compilers. We've moved up the Abstraction Chain ever since we invented FORTRAN and COBOL (and LISP) instead of using assembly language.

We're 'simply' moving up the abstraction hierarchy again. Good!

You know who else mourned the loss of craft? People that don't like PHP and Wordpress because they lower the barrier to entry to creating useful stuff while also leaving around a fair amount of cruft and problems that the people that use them don't understand how to manage.

Like iambateman said: for me it was never about code. Code was a means to an ends and it didn't stop at code. I'm the kind of software engineer that learned frontends, systems, databases, ETLs, etc -- whatever it was that was that was demanded of me to produce something useful I learned and did it. We're now calling that a "product engineer". The "craft" for me was in creating useful things that were reliable and efficient, not particularly how I styled lines, braces, and brackets. I still do that in the age of AI.

All of this emotional spillage feels for not. The industry is changing as it always has. The only constant I've ever experienced in this industry is change. I realized long ago that when the day comes that I am no longer comfortable with change then that is my best signal that this industry is no longer for me.

The death of a means to an end is the birth of an end itself.

When cameras became mainstream, realism in painting went out of fashion, but this was liberating in a way as it made room for many other visual art styles like Impressionism. The future of programming/computing is going to be interesting.

We have CNC machines, and we still have sculptors.

Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries.

I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.

The more popular it becomes for coding, the more likely a model collapse will occur.

Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.

Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety, bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse.

Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.