The only problem with this analogy is that LLMs are not orbital sanders... Or if they are, they are orbital sanders that operate correctly only 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time they do the wrong thing and cause you to do more work and/or damage the wood (not a great analogy though).

>they are orbital sanders that operate correctly only 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time they do the wrong thing and cause you to do more work and/or damage the wood

So more of a home-gamer chainsaw? Except that I'm not positive the once/twice per year chainsaw is nearly so effective.

Power tools aren’t exactly the paragon of determinism. It’s ways to make mistakes with them, easy for wood to get caught the wrong way, relatively easy to injure yourself.

not a bad analogy imo. power tools vs hand tools. faster, but if you're not careful you can cause more damage before you notice. like a table saw, where you can cut too far or at an angle and the result will look bad. or an electric screwdriver, where you don't feel the torque as much, so it's easier to cross-thread.

and skills from building with hand tools help you judge the results, but not necessarily with actually using the tools.

It's like every time we discuss this on hn we have to go back to basics.

Builders/makers can be roughly subdivided into two camps: some like building for the final products; others like building for the process itself.

I'm in the latter camp. OP probably too. You probably are in the former.

And that's fine. But let's just stop pretending the other side doesn't exist.

EDIT: And this goes for OP as well. They forgot a lot of "for me"s in the article.

You don't need the "for me", it's implicit in it being an article written by someone in a casual setting. I'd argue the issue is that we as internet blog post readers treat these think pieces with more gravitas then they deserve as a baseline.

Good point

What are you talking about lmao, tons of carpenters have said that. The subjective experience of your craft is shaped by the tools you chose to use. For some people, and I venture this is most often true for master craftspeople, not only is the journey is more important than the destination, but the limitations of the path breed the creativity needed to even arrive at the destination.

The example is not helpful though, probably a lot of carpenter said similar things. knowledge and attention to detail is absolutely lost with power tools and loud machines can take away a lot from the experience of working with wood. It also made the work more dangerous by instantly removing fingers and inhaling powder that was just not there before. It gave carpenters speed in return. Can you maybe give a better example?

> No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there".

I would guess probably lots did say that?

At the very least I have no idea why you would be able to claim otherwise, we are far removed in time from when there were carpenters straddling the introduction of power tools.

But that’s not the right analogy, in my opinion. It would be a carpenter saying “I used to carve by hand, but now I tell the carving machine to make a chair and it spits it out.”

Yes, using analogies of comparing LLMs to relatively simple tools and on the same plane declaring them the predecessors to AGI (or for some, we have achieved AGI) is a common hypocritical take.

Maybe you’re partly right, maybe not, but I don’t think this is a good analogy. Let’s say output is the most important thing, which is the implication here. But why do I care about my output? Why does a woodworker care about their output?

For a woodworker, I think your analogy should be a “furniture factory,” not power tools. (Power tools in software would be like a great IDE and powerful language and framework tooling; AI is… way more than that.) I bet a “woodworker” in a furniture factory (if that even exists) doesn’t much care about their output, and doesn’t love the process anymore.

And getting paid for it doesn’t make you care about your work either, it just makes you care about money you can use on other things you do care about.

It would be foolish for anyone looking at the great change happening in software, and ignore the fact that we’re crossing a line where it’s less about craft, and where developers are just managing factory-like processes. Which is very different from what most signed up for.

And of course you can still do your craft, just like there are custom woodworkers as well as factories. But the space for that in AI-driven companies is vanishing as much as we might hate it or push back against it.

And of course there are also people like you who like the opportunity that more output provides, or who use it more like a tool and less like a factory. And that’s fine.

But no, the transition happening in the industry is not deliberately trying to keep the craft of it or even to keep developers interested in the job.

The transition is turning people who input stuff into a software factory and do QA on the output, or turning people into “factory automation engineers.” Those are both very different jobs from what people who like programming signed up for.

And yeah maybe no one “deserves” to have craft in their jobs. But let’s be honest, it is very natural, and very human, to be upset when the main motivation and reason for doing your work disappears. The same thing has happened in countless industries, and people have been talking about it for decades if not hundreds of years.

E.g. small-time farming replaced by exploitative big agriculture. A farmer might have a reason and identify in the work before, owning their own bit of land they tender. And now if they’re just hired to drive a tractor, they don’t. It’s a massive difference, and no wonder our society is increasingly depressed.

Actually, you'll find in this comment thread a lot of carpenters that prefer doing it "by hand": https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/xvgynk/i_dont_...

I think more apt analogy is that now I get random parts from Ikea and screw them together to something that resembles furniture. Just need to get enough parts and eventually they mostly fit. Customers really don't notice any difference.

This is comparing apples and powertools. ;-)

Despite now having all these tools, a carpenter still needs a lot of skill to create something. If you hand me all the modern tools in existence, I'll probably still cut off both my thumbs and end up with a chair which breaks the moment I try to sit on it.

LLMs allow any person with no skills whatsoever to create almost anything they want. Quality is often good enough or doesn't matter at all. There's no skill needed because Claude will happily tell the person what they are missing and do it for them in the same step.

I totally feel what's expressed in the article: I've been in web development for 25 years now and I have never been this depressed in my life, because AI took most of what I cared for in my job and left me staring into a bleak future of becoming unemployed or pivoting into something I'm gonna hate doing for the rest of my life.