At one point well before the age of industrialization all furniture was hand crafted so to speak by trained artisans. As time went on they started working together in workshops, had more formal training processes through guilds and perhaps most important saw improved work flows through specialization, improved tooling and the use of ever more sophisticated jigs and templates.

Industrialization took things to another lever. Mastery meant skill in using ever more complicated and industrialized machinery. Profit seeking behavior set the focus on automation, repeatability and perhaps most important reducing the skill necessary to do the job.

Today nearly all furniture is made in factories using not wood but rather sawdust and wood particles glued and pressed together. The process is deskilled, if anything the skilled work is in designing, manufacturing and tuning the machines that make the furniture, not in making furniture itself.

We still teach woodworking in schools, oddly enough though we typically teach it through the lens of using modern machinery when in my opinion when should teach it as art form using traditional hand tools as that type of work is safer, less noisy, cheaper, requires less safe and most important me doesn't have you breathing in airborne particles of sawdust.

This is more of a realization and perhaps a question for you the reader but with the age of AI upon us, will coding go the way of wood working. Will the number of coders become less and less? Will it become deskilled? Will a good coder simply become someone proficient in the use of AI tools? It would seem we're at the dawn of the industrial revolution where the nature of wood working probably started to change.

The problem with the industrialisation analogy is that it ought to have already happened.

I'd already been coding from textbooks for a decade by the time my formal education included it, but that formal education began with VisualBasic.

Of all the apps I've been paid to work on, the only ones which you couldn't have done just fine in something like VB were the games, because they were performance limited.

Everything else, well, things like REST APIs and JSON are implementation details that don't fundamentally matter. The UI and UX team should have been able to plug in the relevant values for how to talk to the database like they set a Figma design's colour codes, without needing to care if those things meant a database was on-device or remote. Reactive UI and its bindings are *exactly* the kind of thing best done graphically rather than in code, even if you still need a database administrator for the database to work well.

The actual real hard stuff? Last time I was paid to actually make trade-offs to figure out optimisations I needed to make was 2012 or so. To the extent that one of my recent agentic coding experiments was to give myself such constraints once again (turns out you can find the travel time from any start location to all other locations in Berlin in 60ms in a web browser if you try).

The real work has become the politics of fashion, not of good code but of which framework and design pattern is in vogue.

The first compiler was written in 1952. Lisp has been around since 1958. We've been metaprogramming for a while already.

The difference between coding and woodwork is that programming a machine to do woodwork is not woodwork, but programming a machine to write code is still programming.

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