[rsanheim]

> In the old days, developers had to really know their stuff. Coding wasn’t just a checklist—it was a craft, and every line was written with care.

you've lost me here.

Caring and attention to quality have always been in short supply. Or supply _and_ demand when I think of some of the startups I've worked for.

[swatcoder]

Would you believe we were once writing code without going online and with just a few essential commercial libraries, if anything besides what our OS and toolchain provides at all? We'd literally have to keep a mental model of our code and all the things it touches and would personally write the utilities we needed to get it done.

Of course it's absurd to claim "every line was written with care" but there really has been a radical transformation in how people engage with the craft and the kind of work they produce as a result.

And the current way is quite hapless in comparsion, even while it enables more people to participate and even if the end products have capabiltiies that people couldn't even consider a few decades ago. As an industry, we make wild stuff now and that's impressive. But as a craft, we're in a very dark place that's looking even dimmer with the arrival of generative coding assistants and bots.

[abnercoimbre]

Hope you don't mind the self-plug, but I'm helping run a community [0] dedicated to reviving the craft, with a conference [1] coming up in a couple weeks!

[0] https://handmade.network

[1] https://handmadecities.com

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean, given that copilot is just regurgitating common patterns, it's getting the bad practices from it's training data.

[Smoosh]

“Startups” are not “the old days”.