The craft is alive and well in embedded spaces.

When I was growing up as a programmer I observed JavaScript and swore I would never, ever touch webdev. As I got older that list kept growing to include mobile, then Apple, then desktop in general.

I like my little world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work.

And it's not that there isn't any embedded slopware, but the constraints are so much tighter that you can't really get away with the same level of bad code on 1KB ram and 4KB flash that you can on a 32 core desktop CPU with practically infinite resources.

It's a false dichotomy. You can do both, depending on the project. Or even different areas in the same software. There are many things that just need writing and there's really no fancy craft in transcribing that new business rule, regardless how much you care - the difference is just who pushes the buttons for the same result.

This reminds me of the Google/Oracle Java case where one of the example "copied code" fragments was some trivial code with null guards. Anyone could write this and end up with the same code. Human/LLM/whatever doesn't matter. That fragment just needed to exist.

Every now and then someone posts the "X programmers (implied good) hate AI, Y programmers (implied bad) hate AI!" and every time people come out of the woodwork to point out that, no, X programmers can also use AI to take out things they can delegate and focus on stuff that's cool. Case in point, Steve Klabnik, a programmer who nobody can say doesn't care about the craft, is working on a new language primarily with AI: https://rue-lang.dev/

The one engineer in my life who cared about the craft of software development also refused to have a color profile pic and also did his zooms in black and white and thought Ruby was the only good programming language.

Personally I think of custom houses vs tract homes as an analogy.

People won't care that much if their daily life software is developed by artisan developers, offshore coders or ai. They will just need to get things done and won't be able to tell who wrote the code.

That said, I still think there will be a spec, and that spec will mostly be written by humans.

I quit my big-tech job 4 years ago and it feels like that was just in time. I don't think I would enjoy the current way. I still program a lot, but as a hobby, and still thoroughly enjoy the craft. I sometimes ask chatgpt for a function name, but mostly stay away from ai. I do realize that I'm less and less employable as a software engineer though.

I used to be intrigued by _software craftsmanship_, but I mainly saw people using it to practice heavy gatekeeping. Be it on the job, in code reviews, in job interviews...

Furthermore, given how they behave in a cult-like way, it feels like they are straight-up delusional.

People working as consultants for big retail chains, talking all day long about "the craft". Nobody cares. They sell trash. They don't put marble in their store. They don't want fancy software. Furthermore, if, by trying to force "the craft" to their peers, all they do is making the life of others miserable... Just stop. Please.

Now my approach is as follow:

if stakeholders are only interested in two things (how-much it cost, when it's ready), which is 99% of the case at $JOB, then make something that does the job and that won't make you hate yourself if you have to maintain it in a year

if I'm the stakeholder, like creating internal tooling that nobody asked for but that will solve issues, then yes, I do things as good as I want them to be

same for working on FOSS on my personal time

The craft has, unfortunately, died by a a bunch of tech companies who promised you the craft, but in really were all about making money ASAP, disregarding the craft.

Nowadays, the craft can be practiced at your home, by yourself.

> Just about solving problems

Or just about making money :(

There’s room for both types of people in any trade. Some photographers obsess over the equipment, some only care about the photos. Carpenters with tools. Musicians with instruments & gear. Every craft has people who care about the how and those who focus on the product.

I’ve always enjoyed the craft of software engineering, though even I admit the culture around it can be a bit overly contemplative .

Nevertheless, there is room for both personalities. Just hang out with likeminded people and ignore the rest.

I like programming as a craft, but the kinds of coding I do for fun and the kinds of coding I do for profit look very, very different. So, for my work programming I use AI a lot more than I do in my own time.

After all, my work (for the moment) is just about pushing features to keep the PMs happy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After a certain point, I think "craft" becomes a meaningless and self-flattering scapegoat, similar to how people use "taste" or "courage" as an excuse to make boneheaded decisions. Most software customers aren't buying software because it's tasteful or impressively crafted, but because it fills a gap in their workflow. People who obsess over polish often end up missing the forest for the trees.

Plus, code-based meritocracy flat-out doesn't exist outside the FOSS circle. Many of the people you know are clocking-in at a job using a tech stack from 2004, they aren't paid to recognize good craftsmanship. They show up, close some tickets, play Xbox during on-call and collect their paycheck on Friday.

The people who care might be self-selecting for their own failure. It's hard to make money in tech if your passion for craft is your strongest attribute.

It is a great learning tool for people who are willing to learn and put in the time and effort. Ask good questions, double check everything, read documentation and make sure they understand everything before they move on. It's a tremendous tool if used correctly. People who just hit tab or past everything Claude generates will get worse. The benefits of "the old way" is that even the people who didn't want to put in the effort where making some improvement if only by friction and time spent.

You can go to a restaurant to see new dishes (which isn't nothing) but it wont exactly teach you how to cook.

This is like telling people to learn how to draw by only looking at the masters' paintings in person instead of tracing and imitating from possibly stolen but otherwise cheap books at home.

I would say to at least just read what the AI does and ask it questions if you don't understand what it did. You can interactively learn software development from AI in a way that you cannot from a human simply because it won't run out of patience even if it will lie to you.

The results depend mostly on how you use it.

It's also extremely good at describing what code is doing, architecture, extrapolating why something is done a certain way etc. Invaluable for me for learning how unfamiliar code works in unfamiliar languages

Personally, I'd rather make something good instead of cleaning up a mess.

But beyond that, I'm really not looking forward to trying to discover new good libraries, tools, and such in 5 years time. The signal to noise is surely dropping.

> someone will have to come in to make the actual product.

My experience has been more that they expect you to fix the broken mess, not rebuild it properly.

New job title: “vibe coding cleanup specialist”

> Why would any actual software engineer be against slopware? When it inevitably all comes crashing down [...] someone will have to come in to make the actual product.

Why would a window maker be against breaking windows?

because a lot of us care about the software running out there being good quality, given how much of the world depends on it. i would very much rather not see it all come crashing down.

This just reads as copium to me. "Those hacks vomiting out slop.. pah, when they call me, the artisan, in to clean up their mess in a way God intended, then they'll see!"

More realistic: AI assisted tooling will continue to improve as it has, the average code quality will rise as conventions and workflows improve and those who wait to be called in to clean up slop or whatever will wait forever, pushed by the wayside by those who can deliver great quality with the help of these new tools.

Same on r/rust. Post after post with a new project that does something groundbreaking.

Until you look at the source code and notice it's all held together by Duct tape.

Storage is relatively cheap. Packages with only one release and little usage in the wild will be a rounding error in cost. A few years ago, Pypi required an over million dollars equivalent in CDN traffic per month. Storing a million of small dead packages is not worth the concern.

Do we work at the same company?

Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.

That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)

I think it's a pretty small generosity to implicitly extend what the author is saying to "you will learn better without generating your code". I don't know if that's what they meant, but AI is certainly a good tool for learning how things work and seeing examples (if you don't blindly trust everything it says and use other sources too).

I think the parallel is photobashing. I've seen art teachers debating how early a student should start photobashing. Everyone knows it's a widely adopted technique in the industry, but some consider it harmful for beginners.

Needlessly to say there is no consensus. I err on the side of photobashing personally.

Rejecting AI as a learning tool looks to me like a very good policy in an academic setting.

And the completely wrong decision in a hobby setting.

It cannot be understated how much of a boon AI-assisted programming has been for getting stuff up and running. Once you get past the initial hurdle of setting up an environment along with any boilerplate, you can actually start running code and iterating in order to figure out how something works.

Cognitive bandwidth is limited, and if you need to fully understand and get through 10 different errors before anything works, that's a massive barrier to entry. If you're going to be using those tools professionally then eventually you'll want to learn more about how they work, but frontloading a bunch of adjacent tooling knowledge is the quickest way to kill someone's interest.

The standard choice isn't usually between a high-quality project and slopware, it's between slopware or nothing at all.

AI only hurts learning if you let it. You can still use AI and learn effectively if you are thoughtful about the way you apply it.

I think that's very important.

Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.

I have found AI to be a great tool for learning, but I see it -- me, personally -- as a very slippery slope into not learning at all. It is so easy, so trivial, to produce a (seemingly accurate) answer to just about any question whatsoever, no matter how mundane or obscure, that I can really barely engage my own thinking at all.

On one hand, with the goal of obtaining an answer to a question quickly, it's awesome.

On the other hand, I feel like I have learned almost nothing at all. I got precisely, pinpointed down, the exact answer to the question I asked. Going through more traditional means of learning -- looking things up in books, searching web sites, reading tutorials, etc. -- I end up with my answer, but I also end up with more context, and a deeper+broader understanding of the overall problem space.

Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.

I feel like that is both good and bad. I don't want to be too dismissive of the good, but I also feel like it would be unwise to ignore the bad.

Whoa hey though, isn't this just exactly like books? Didn't, like, Plato and all them Greek cats centuries ago say that writing things down would ruin our brains, and what I'm claiming here is 100% the same thing? I don't think so. I see it as a matter of scale. It's a similar effect -- you probably do lose something (whether if it's valuable or not is debatable) when you choose to rely on written words rather than memorize. But it's tiny. With our modern AI tools, there is potential to lose out on much more. You can -- you don't have to, but you can -- do way more coasting, mentally. You can pretty much coast nonstop now.

A robot TA that gives the wrong answer 50% of the time isn't very helpful.

You need to choose another field if it takes you 6 months to hello world

The author probably meant "coding without AI", not "learning without AI".

> There is absolutely no reason why software today has to be written like software of yesterday.

I get what you're saying, but the irony is that AI tools have sort of frozen the state of the art of software development in time. There is now less incentive to innovate on language design, code style, patterns, etc., when it goes outside the range of what an LLM has been trained on and will produce.

> In the end the best will win on the merits.

The last six decades of commercial programming don't exactly bear this out...

The real lesson is that writing software is such a useful, high-leverage activity that even absolutely awful software can be immensely valuable. But that doesn't tell us that better software is useless, it just tells us it is not absolutely necessary.

Software engineers are desperate to have their work be like machining aircraft parts.

It’s a tool. No one cares about code quality because the person using your code isn’t affected by it. There are better and worse tools. No one cares whether a car is made with SnapOn tools or milled on HAAS machines. Only that it functions.

We know there is no long term merit to this idea just looking back at the last 40 years of coding.

Two are optional, and the other 3 are just for a small script to convert the one mardown file to HTML and push it live (of which one (awk) you likely already have on your system). It's actually pretty minimalist. Most tone deaf thing you've seen in your life seems a bit over the top.

This post mirrors my sentiment and the reasons I dislike these sorts of "projects" much more closely than the main site does, deserved to be the main submission, in retrospect.

We'll put that link in the top text, thanks.

That is your belief, not a fact

It has been years since "new models will perform less sloppy code, in 6 months"

Current code is still dumb as hell. The emoticons is the part that works really well.

Indeed, Adobe continues shipping their slop and by all accounts of those who keep using it continue to make it worse, this was all in motion well before modern AI tools. If anything, I bet AI tools are more likely to make things better. I read an anti-AI opinion recently where they had a sense that a small open source project was using AI (and were right, it was easy to see by noticing Claude in the commit history) but what tipped their sense was there were too many "professionalisms" in the code base. Oh no, more code that has documentation and tests and benchmarks, the horror! I also just can't take these "it's stinking up the commons" posts all that seriously -- like where have you been the last couple decades? The baseline seems as likely to improve as to degrade more than it already has. Even the spam of useless pull requests isn't new, the peak of that was probably with peak MOOC popularity some years ago when classes would require submitting pull requests to some open source project as an assignment.

I mean, look at Microsoft. They're a tiny little 5 trillion dollar company and their own cloud storage software can't reliably extract zip files compressed with their own compression software on their own flagship operating system.

How dare some nobody in a third world country use AI resources to accelerate the development of some process that fixes an issue for them and occasionally ask you to buy them a coffee when a poor sad pathetic evil worthless hateful disgusting miserable useless 5 trillion dollar company that actively hates you does the same thing with worse results that makes your life more miserable while lining their pockets with every penny in the entire world?!

This seems directed at people sharing low-effort AI-generated open source projects.

If possible, could you please explain what your slopware does?

You don't seem to be responding to anything the site says.

What's your software?

That assertion is also highly debatable. To me no part of releasing software under a free license implies a "stewardship role."

I'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt here. Not all "you're not X, you're Y" was written by an LLM.

I can't tell what you're referring to. The quote reads well.