Funny thing: a lot of us hardcore Vim users (Thorsten, myself, and a few others) were among the first to embrace agentic coding. You’d expect us to stick to the old ways, writing everything by hand in the terminal. But the opposite happened.
I’ve used Vim since I was 17, for more than two decades. It gave me superpowers. It was hard to learn, but once it clicked, I could do things others couldn’t. I loved it because it made me faster and better at my craft, not because I was attached to writing every line of code myself.
And Thorsten was one of the first people I knew who went all in on AI, back when admitting that your code was AI-generated was kinda embarrassing. So dismissing his views as biased because he now works at an AI company misses the point really. He believed in this long before it became fashionable.
The same goes for me. I’ve spent my entire career building tools that help developers code faster and get better at their craft. That hasn’t changed. But the tools have, and they can now do things we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.
I don’t think craftsmanship is going away. But I do think we need to rethink what craftsmanship means when the tools themselves change so fundamentally. So it's totally normal to see people who were embraced tooling in the past also embrace the current agentic workflows, or even set the bar.
So change is coming whether we like it or not. And I would rather help to shape it, prepare for it, and embrace it than pretend it isn’t happening.
There's some senior engineers on here who, in the face of AI changing the very structures this industry is built on, present themselves as Stewards of the Craft of Programming.
Bugs the hell out for me.
They keep alluding to the virtue of doing things by hand, the value of Good Code and of craftsmanship, saying that yes, AI might change some things, but hey it won't ever change the value of something done with proper care, by hand, just like in the olden days of 2024. Most everything that was Good back then is still Good now: deep knowledge of languages and systems, good code, great architecture. You know the sermon.
And, yes, some of that *is* true. At least I think so. But we don't know, because no one truly knows what will be important in the future.
We're going through times of great change and I think the best advice to give to young people and others who want to have a job and provide value is: keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, derive from what businesses value what you can provide; the digital world is more malleable than ever, you should rethink how you can help shape it.
All this pounding on the Bible of Good Code seems to me to be doing the opposite: it lets people feel comfortable -- what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy -- in times when one shouldn't feel comfortable. This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
Let's not delude ourselves and others that we can keep doing what we've been doing. Rethink it all.
And, like I said, it bugs the hell out of me seeing senior engineers (that are secure in their career) talking as if there's nothing *really* to change, because the Fundamentals will still be valued. They might!
But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.