Code, Craft or Commodity

The divide between developers who love writing code and those who love building software is becoming painfully obvious in the AI debate.

For some, code is the craft. For others, it’s a means to an end.

I’ve always been in the latter camp. I enjoy solving problems, building products, and shipping features. Writing code is just how I’ve been doing that.

That doesn’t mean I don’t care about code quality. I do. But I don’t particularly care whether I wrote it myself.

And I suspect that’s where much of the hostility towards AI comes from.

If writing code is what you love, AI threatens the part of the job you enjoy most. If building software is what you love, AI is probably the best thing that’s happened to you in years.

Neither is wrong. But it might explain why we’re having such fundamentally different conversations about the same technology.