Maybe you’re partly right, maybe not, but I don’t think this is a good analogy. Let’s say output is the most important thing, which is the implication here. But why do I care about my output? Why does a woodworker care about their output?

For a woodworker, I think your analogy should be a “furniture factory,” not power tools. (Power tools in software would be like a great IDE and powerful language and framework tooling; AI is… way more than that.) I bet a “woodworker” in a furniture factory (if that even exists) doesn’t much care about their output, and doesn’t love the process anymore.

And getting paid for it doesn’t make you care about your work either, it just makes you care about money you can use on other things you do care about.

It would be foolish for anyone looking at the great change happening in software, and ignore the fact that we’re crossing a line where it’s less about craft, and where developers are just managing factory-like processes. Which is very different from what most signed up for.

And of course you can still do your craft, just like there are custom woodworkers as well as factories. But the space for that in AI-driven companies is vanishing as much as we might hate it or push back against it.

And of course there are also people like you who like the opportunity that more output provides, or who use it more like a tool and less like a factory. And that’s fine.

But no, the transition happening in the industry is not deliberately trying to keep the craft of it or even to keep developers interested in the job.

The transition is turning people who input stuff into a software factory and do QA on the output, or turning people into “factory automation engineers.” Those are both very different jobs from what people who like programming signed up for.

And yeah maybe no one “deserves” to have craft in their jobs. But let’s be honest, it is very natural, and very human, to be upset when the main motivation and reason for doing your work disappears. The same thing has happened in countless industries, and people have been talking about it for decades if not hundreds of years.

E.g. small-time farming replaced by exploitative big agriculture. A farmer might have a reason and identify in the work before, owning their own bit of land they tender. And now if they’re just hired to drive a tractor, they don’t. It’s a massive difference, and no wonder our society is increasingly depressed.