| Someone smart said that AI should replace tasks, not jobs. There are infinite analogies for this whole thing, but it mostly distills down to artisans and craftsmen in my mind. Artisans build one chair to perfection, every joint is meticulously measured and uses traditional handcrafted Japanese joinery, not a single screw or nail is used unless it's absolutely necessary. It takes weeks to build one, each one is an unique work of art. It also costs 2000€ for a chair. Craftsmen optimise their process for output, instead of selling one 2000€ chair a month, they'd rather sell a hundred for 20€. They have templates for cutting every piece, jigs for quickly attaching different components, use screws and nails to speed up the process instead of meticulous handcrafted joinery. It's all about where you get your joy in "software development". Is it solving problems efficiently or crafting a beautiful elegant expressive piece of code? Neither way is bad, but pre-LLM both people could do the same tasks. I think that's coming to an end in the near future. The difference between craftsmen and artisans is becoming clearer. There is a place for people who create that beautiful hyper-optimised code, but in many (most) cases just a craftsman with an agentic LLM tool will solve the customer's problem with acceptable performance and quality in a fraction of the time. |