To use your own analogy, there's plenty of carpenters still around for when someone needs something doing properly and bespoke, even though we can all go to Ikea, or any other flat pack furniture company, to get wobbly furniture cheaply at any time.
I'd rather be the last carpenter charging a liveable wage, working on interesting problems for clients who appreciate a human touch than just pumping out mountains of slop to keep up with the broligarchy. If that makes me ignorant that's fine, but I'll be happily enjoying the craft while you're worrying about your metrics.
In 2005, Tim Bryce wrote that programmers were by and large a lazy, discipline-averse lot who are of average intelligence at best but get very precious about their "craft", not realizing that it's only a small part of a greater whole and it's the business people who drive actual value in a company. AI is proving him 100% correct.
You forget that templates and off the shelf SAAS products have been around forever and yet I'm still here getting work because there's always a catch and it always shits the bed.
You mention that I must have a user/skill issue because the AI can't be trusted, I had to explain multiple times to Claude during my work that it had left a very obvious security hole in a controller and in a different policy. Stop pretending it's some sort of super intelligence, they can't even do a timer bro and OpenAI is laughing at you while taking your money.
Is it some kind of fear or doubt? It's a strange phenomenon.
Like for example I strongly believe Typescript is better than Javascript and needs to be used instead for any serious project. But if someone says they don't like it, I cannot imagine myself writing a post like yours about it. First of all I don't care what they use, but second of all if I really wanted to convince them it would not look anything like this. Your post and many like it reads like anger and condescension and incredulity.
Me thinks something far more bizarro is aloof.
Im not even a SWE btw so I have no financial interest here, but I can see how bizarre his post is.
Lmao software engineers are engineers because its not their job to be the business guy. Man you have been here since 2007 but you sound like an absolute bozo.
FYI I am a CEO and I would never expect my engineers to be thinking like a business person - thats my job. Their job is to go make my vision a reality whilst ensuring the product is trusted and so on.
Or in other words - 'non existent'.
It is arrogant and luddite to suggest that 'using AI is not doing it properly' or that anyone will care.
They care that it's done well - that's it.
FYI, the code that AI produces is probably better than what you produce - at least a functional level.
'Artisanility' is worthless in 'code' - there are no 'winding staircases' for us to custom build, as a master carpenter would.
Where you can continue to 'write code by hand' is for very arcane, things, but even then you're still going to have to use AI for a lot of things in support of that.
So if you want to get into compiler design - sure.
But still - without mastery of AI, you'll be left behind.
At least with horses, there's a naturalist component, with 'code' - nobody cares at all. There's zero interest in it, there's not 'organic' angle to sell.
If you want to have a race to the bottom and be Sam Altman's lap dog, that your business.
