many people really loved the craft of writing software and realized that the quality of software products was a partial derivative of the quality of the codebase. people would go out of their way to only work for founders who understood this and made this core to their companies. [...]
In this new age of ai agents, I couldn't be more excited that I can build products faster and at a higher quality than I ever could before. [...] everyone has been given superpowers! [...]
on the flip side, it feels dissociative to know that the craft of writing software itself is dead, after spending close to two decades doing it. [...]
I've had my last debate over linting, my last conversation about how many weeks we should spend cleaning up tech debt, my last PR where I wrote every character by hand, and my last bug fix that took hours of reading through thousands of lines manually to find the one line with no tests that broke things.
and so I empathize with the mathematicians who have lost the craft of mathematics that defined their working hours, their passion, and for many, their identities.
yes, most of the work they did, as viewed by outsiders, was a means to an end: to get the solution! but they, like software engineers, have lost part of the craft that felt core to the work.
Ben Williams, founder di Hansel.so.