A chef who sharpens his knives should stop because it doesn't add value
A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end
This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.
Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?
I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I really like using knives!"), not really about whether the food is better.
I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.
Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have been able to happen without the decade of experience it took you to get to the Staff level engineering position at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the skills required to review the AI code you're producing properly.
I thought it's interesting that GPT5's comments (on prompting it for feedback on the article) seem to overlap with some of the points you guys made:
My [GPT5's -poster's note] take / Reflections
I find the article a useful provocation:
it asks us to reflect on what we value in being programmers.
It’s not anti-AI per se, but it is anti-losing-the-core craft.
For someone in your position (in *redacted* / Europe)
it raises questions about what kind of programming work you want:
deep, challenging, craft-oriented, or more tool/AI mediated.
It might also suggest you think about building skills
that are robust to automation: e.g., architecture,
critical thinking, complex problem solving, domain knowledge.
The identity crisis is less about “will we have programmers” and
more “what shapes will programming roles take”.
Absolutely. But, what if the point of using the knives, is to be able to understand how to use the machines which can use knives for us, and if we're not replicating the learning part, where do we end up?
It's both. Speaking as a user, software quality was already declining before AI coding, but AI seems to have put that process on a fast track now (not the least because of all the top management drinking the Kool-Aid and deciding that they can replace the people they have with it).
A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?
Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!
I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?
But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?
There are chefs but they are not us. Though it will upset many to hear it, what we are is fast food workers, assembling and reheating prepackaged stuff provided to us. Now a machine threatens to do the assembling and reheating for us, better and faster than we on average do.
The chefs coming up with recipes and food scientists doing the pre-packaging will do fine and are still needed. The people making the fast food machine will also do well for themselves. The rest of us fast food workers, well, not so much...
Not really even for people running a restaurant. The fast food machine means that a dozen competitors can spring up to compete with most restaurant's niche overnight unless they are serving up something truly special. (And they're not because if they were, the fast food machine would be wholly inadequate to churn out their menu.) Success comes down to other factors like marketing and blind luck winning customers.
I genuinely don't think it's hard to compete. I use AI sometimes, I don't use it more than I use it. I find myself at least just-as-productive as people who primarily use AI.
I personally tire of people acting like it's some saving grace that doubles/triples/100x your productivity and not a tool that may give you 10-20% uplift just like any other tool
This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster was going on about knives, forgetting that the final product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food is inferior, then the food is inferior.
A contractor who prefers a specific brand of tool is wrong because the tool is a means to an end
This is what you sound like. Just because you don't understand the value of a craftsman picking and maintaining their tools doesn't mean the value isn't real.