Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer

The economic costs of LLM use have been abstracted away, but they're still very much there. The ecological cost of building and running data centres will be a pretty heavy economic cost somewhere in the future. It's not obvious, but it still exists.

(I'm not dumping on LLMs — otherwise I wouldn't even be here. I'm not a glutton for punishment. I know well that HN users excited about LLM use now vocally outweigh, and are pretty intolerant of people who are more on the cautious/negative end of the spectrum. I don't want that trouble in my life).

A builder fits that description. Even a cook fits that description.

Engineering is something else. It's hard to describe what it is, probably why it has its own word. Dictionaries probably offer a definition.

> A good engineer will acknowledge this tradeoff between robustness and cost and behave accordingly.

An engineer will never intentionally produce something shoddy for cost reasons. They will simply refuse to do it. What you are getting at it some tasks don't require an engineer at all. You want to build a bridge to span a kilometer of water? You need an engineer. You need to occasionally cross a ditch? Anyone could lay plank across. No engineer required. The author makes this point too, with software craftsmen.

>> “artisanal” coders who value the experience of coding over the final product

I don't see "artisanal" as that. It may be more that they value the details rather than the experience of coding. They value the details of the final product. Details that most people will not care about. The details that are present in bespoke clothing but missing in fast fashion, the details that are present in a good restaurant's food but missing from a gas station food item.

an engineer uses tools that represent the current state of the science, while a craftsman uses tools passed down as archaic art that require meticulous skill to use rather than repeatable math

Very little of it lasts for long. And if it does, it's legacy banking or some ossified terrible thing people are afraid to touch - not something revered.

Every piece of software today will be rewritten. By 2100 much of it will be dead and gone. Like punch cards that have rotted away.

The actual artisans don't need to advertise themselves as artisans, they just sell shit.

It does require a different kind of ego/abilities than before. My (negative) framing of the whiplash effect is that it’s a reckoning of “process fetishism”/a bad kind of careerism in the tech hiring market (because for the labor market to work, candidates need to be evaluable and sortable by businesses, and many people build an identity/optimize for legibility around “best practices” or very particular “technologies” which might get them a job).

Ultimately, you need to know and learn/be responsible for stuff, and be able to help people with your labor, not be “a type of person” that isn’t effective at the task of helping. But at the same time knowing things and being able to take accountability/help people remains critical, especially because that’s what people will want to pay for even as “time spent typing it in” decreases.

Personally, I think it will be a good thing because software and “tech” will become a more strongly domain-driven/enabling medium for real-world or specialized things. IE it is the end to “software for its own sake” or “willingness to type it in and play with Jira/jenkins/frameworks” and the beginning of something that is more applicable or knowledge-building rather than “being the X for Y at Z”. Harder but more fun :)

LLMs have very little to do with engineering, unless you let a pair of dice decide how you build a house.

Cars are not built by AIs, they're built by extremely precise robots, over precise instructions.

I'd VERY much want a hand-made car over an LLM-made car, thank you.

Because I do want the precision, reliability and performance that an LLM-made car won't ever be able to guarantee.

The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally.

You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.

Jokes really do write themselves sometimes...

It's of course impossible to have any nuance or middle ground here where you use LLMs to assist while you still focus on the engineering design decisions and the quality.