We mourn our craft

Source: Hacker News

Introduction

I didn’t ask for this and neither did you.

I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.

And yet here we are. The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

The Reality of AI Tools

You could abstain out of moral principle. And that’s fine, especially if you’re at the tail end of your career.

If you’re at the beginning of your career, you don’t need me to explain any of this to you, because you already use Warp and Cursor and Claude, with ChatGPT as your therapist, pair‑programmer, and maybe even your lover. This post is for the 40‑somethings in my audience who don’t realize this fact yet.

Choices for Senior Developers

So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka‑powered jetpacks while you’re still riding around on a fixie bike.

Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your Zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.

Ultimately, if you have a mortgage, a car payment, and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision. It may not be the decision your younger, more idealistic self would want you to make, but it does keep your car, your house, and your family safe.

Nostalgia for a Hand‑Coded Era

Someday, years from now, we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers.

Secretly, we’ll miss it.

We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that finally relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good.

We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of an oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

Conclusion

I don’t celebrate the new world, but I also don’t resist it. The sun rises, the sun sets, I orbit helplessly around it, and my protests can’t stop it. It doesn’t care; it continues its arc across the sky regardless, moving but unmoved.

If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like a blacksmith’s tool in an archaeological dig—a curio for future generations. It cannot be helped; it is the nature of all things to pass to dust, and yet we can mourn. Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.