We mourn our craft

Re:We mourn our craft by altmanaltman on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:41PM (#46926964)

So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process.

It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!"

I mean sure yeah but also not really.

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Re:We mourn our craft by mikepurvis on Saturday February 07, 2026 @03:02PM (#46927270)

Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like:

- infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y.

- porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17.

- tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python.

- fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible

- fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here?

In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:We mourn our craft by altmanaltman on Sunday February 08, 2026 @03:46AM (#46932553)

But this just makes me feel like it's literally more ABOUT the code than less. The comment I replied to makes it seem like "code" and "solving humanity's problems" are two different things, when in reality, one leads to the other (if we assume you're working on good products, etc.).

It's one thing to have your approach where you're using AI to help w/ the code, but it's totally another to pretend like "code" is not something you were ever interested in, so it's okay for the AI to write it while you're busy "solving problems," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[ Parent | on HN ]