Grief and the AI Split

Les Orchard wrote on his blog:

Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

Now there’s a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built, or you can insist on hand-crafting it. And suddenly the reason you got into this in the first place becomes visible, because the two camps are making different choices at that fork.

I wrote about this split before in terms of my college math and CS classes: some of us loved proofs and theorems for their own sake, some of us only clicked with the material when we could apply it to something. I tended to do better in classes focused on application and did not-so-well in pure math classes. (I still want to take another crack at Calculus someday, but that’s a different story.)

I find myself in the “craft-lover” camp, but I think many of my colleagues are in the “make-it-go” camp. Indeed, most companies would prefer their workers to be in the latter camp. (Thanks, capitalism!)

It’s deeply jarring to find myself suddently apart from the prevailing attitude about software engineering in the communities where I practice.

Via Michael Tsai.