The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill.

You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.

The only confusion is in the use of the term "woodworking".

For the power tool user, "woodworking with hand tools" isn't their craft.

For the CNC user, "woodworking with manual machines" isn't their craft.

I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.

It's feeling much closer to hiring a woodworker to make you something, not woodworking tools

The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.

There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.

There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.

Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!

I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.

We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).

But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.

The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...

Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.

Perhaps.

[dead]

That is an insane assumption to make based on the grandparents' post. What part of them talking about how much they care about the systems thinking and software architecture and usefulness and meaningfulness to other people of software over the day-to-day drudgery of APIs and bugs and typing in syntax indicates to you that they only care about money and status? They just care about a different part of the process.

I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of college when I got an internship at AWS. I constantly programmed and read programming texts in my spare time growing up, in college, and after work.

I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.

I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.

> many went into this field for money

I went into this field for both! what do i do now, i'm screwed

A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)

Right, there is a non-zero overlap between the VIM Andy's and AI nay-sayers.

And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge

this is so true.

never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars