There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.
For the power tool user, "woodworking with hand tools" isn't their craft.
For the CNC user, "woodworking with manual machines" isn't their craft.
There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.
There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.
We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).
But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.
The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...
Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.
Perhaps.
I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.
I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.
I went into this field for both! what do i do now, i'm screwed
I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level. Now I’m doing both with AI and it’s a lot of fun. It is just programming at a higher level.
Almost none of the code I wrote in 2015 is still in use today. Probably some percentage of people can point to code that lasted 20 years or longer, but it can’t be a big percentage. When I think of the work of a craft, I think of doing work which is capable of standing up for a long time. A great builder can make a house that can last for a thousand years and a potter can make a bowl that lasts just as long.
I’ve thought of myself as a craftsman of code for a long time but maybe that was just wrong.
It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now.
Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet.
But my craft was not typing. It's coding.
If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.
I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.
It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.
It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.
You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.
(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)
Even though once upon a time both did.
Claiming that this isn't coding is as absurd as saying that coding is only what you do when you hook up the wires between some vacuum tubes.
The LLM is a very smart compiler. That's all.
Some people want to sit and write assembly. Good for them. But asserting that unless I assemble my own code I'm not a coder is just silly.
Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.
never once in my life i saw anything get better. except for metal gear solid psx and gears of wars
have you used them recently?
terrible, is the word I would use
(as a customer since the 2010s)