Now this, putting aside my thoughts above, i find a compelling argument. You just don’t want to. I think that should go along with a reasonable understanding of what a person is choosing to not use, but I’ll presume you have that.

Then? Sure, the frustrating part is to see someone making that choice tell other people that theirs is invalid, especially when we don’t know what the scene will look like when the dust settles.

There’s no reason to think there wouldn’t be room for “pure code” folks. I use the camera comparison— I fully recognize it doesn’t map in all respect to this. But the idea that painters should have given up paint?

There were in fact people at the time who said, “Painting is dead!”. Gustav Flaubert, famous author, said painting was obsolete. Paul Delaroche Actually said it was dead. Idiots. Amazingly talented and accomplished, but short sighted, idiots. Well like be laughing at some amazing and talented people making such statement about code today in the same light.

Code as art? Well, two things: 1) LLM’s have tremendous difficulty parsing very dense syntax, and then addressing the different pieces and branching ideas. Even now. I’m guessing this transfers to code that must be compact, embedded, and optimized to a precision such that sufficient training data, generalizable to the task with all the different architectures of microcontrollers and embedded systems… not yet. My recommendation to coders who want to look for areas where AI will be unsuitable? There’s plenty of room at the bottom. Career has never taken me there, but the most fun I’ve had coding has been homebrew microcontrollers.

2) code as art. Not code to produce art, or not something separable from the code that created it. Think Thing minor things from the past like the obfuscated C challenges. Much of that older hacker ethos is fundamentally an artistic mindset. Art has a business model, some enterprising person aught to crack the code of coding code into a recognized art form where aesthetic is the utility.

I don’t even mean the visual code, but that is viable: Don’t many coders enjoy the visual aesthetic of source code, neatly formatted, colored to perfect contrasts between types etc? I doubt that’s the limit of what could be visually interesting, something that still runs. Small audience for it sure— same with most art.

Doesn’t matter, I doubt that will be something masses of coders turn to, but my point is simply that there are options there are options that involve continuing the “craft” aspects you enjoy, whether my napkin doodle of an idea above holds or not. The option, for many, may simply not include keeping the current trajectory of their career. Things change: not many professional coders that began at 20 in 1990 have been able— or willing— to stay in the narrow area they began in. I knew some as a kid that I still know, some that managed to stay on that same path. He’s a true craftsman at COBOL. When I was a bit older in one of my first jobs he helped me learn my way around a legacy VMS cluster. Such things persist, reduced in proportion to the rest is all. But that is an aspect of what’s happening today.

> “Don’t want… “not accepting”

misrepresents my position a bit. Those were quite separate thoughts.

While I don't want to, I accept that others do, and will, and will be productive doing so.

What I won't accept is an attitude to bugs along the lines of “ah, that was the AI, what can you do?”, which implies either the tool is trusted far too much or people are simply being lazy. This already seems to be creeping in in places, and causes concerns about both security and stability if it is allowed to proliferate.

My endgame is not to be beholden to any given corporations' sense of value (because it is rarely in the engineering), so I don't personally care what happens at large. I'll still enjoy the "craft" on my own and figure out the lines where I need to take a disciplined stance and grind it out myself, where I take on a dependency, or where I leave the work to a black box.

But if time comes for collaboration, then we'll work as a team. AKA we'll decide those lines and likely compromise on values to create something larger than the all of us. I doubt my line will ever be "let's just vibecode everything". But it's likely not going to be "use zero AI" unless I have a very disciplined team at hand and no financial stress between any of us.