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9 comments
> Speaking as a developer, this becomes obvious the moment you step outside the romantic framing. I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.
> None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certainly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.
It is becoming increasingly true that they do exactly this. In some cases, better than (some? many?) humans.
Also, the anti-Marxist Objectivism rant has no place in this article, as well as making no sense. Yes, the woodworker could continue working with their hands. But in society, today, they require money in order to have food and shelter, and that money needs to come from somewhere. If the market devalues the process of doing work by hand, and comes to value the speed and consistency of doing work through machines and automation, then the artisan cannot choose to simply continue spending dozens of hours per week working wood unless they are independently wealthy or have some other source of income. Individualism is not paramount in a society in which you are forced to participate for basic needs.
> None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certainly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.
It is becoming increasingly true that they do exactly this. In some cases, better than (some? many?) humans.
Also, the anti-Marxist Objectivism rant has no place in this article, as well as making no sense. Yes, the woodworker could continue working with their hands. But in society, today, they require money in order to have food and shelter, and that money needs to come from somewhere. If the market devalues the process of doing work by hand, and comes to value the speed and consistency of doing work through machines and automation, then the artisan cannot choose to simply continue spending dozens of hours per week working wood unless they are independently wealthy or have some other source of income. Individualism is not paramount in a society in which you are forced to participate for basic needs.
Quite a decent read, actually.
Boils down to the same "Typing is removed as a bottleneck but it was never the real job." And at least attempts to re-instill a lost sense of agency I see from developers here and there.
Essentially.. "The craft changes, you decide to maintain what you love or what the market rewards". So, maybe we all just loved coding so much that we happened to make money doing it? I'm not sure that's the essence of the anxiety floating around. I think it's more of an evaporating opportunity to use your experience to provide for yourself, that people are worried about.
Boils down to the same "Typing is removed as a bottleneck but it was never the real job." And at least attempts to re-instill a lost sense of agency I see from developers here and there.
Essentially.. "The craft changes, you decide to maintain what you love or what the market rewards". So, maybe we all just loved coding so much that we happened to make money doing it? I'm not sure that's the essence of the anxiety floating around. I think it's more of an evaporating opportunity to use your experience to provide for yourself, that people are worried about.
kind of agree with the actual point about programming; the framing is some Ayn Rand claptrap
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this is juvenile bullshit and probably AI generated
it's an important part of the craft that it is useful
if it became useless because of machines then it isn't the same thing anymore
it's an important part of the craft that it is useful
if it became useless because of machines then it isn't the same thing anymore
Meh it’s a thread on repeat every week. This “hot take” is beating a dead horse. Now we just need another follow-up that re-explains what Luddites were and weren’t for the eleventh time, and then come back full circle just in time for next week.
Unless Trump declares another war so we can keep the front page busy with that.
Show HN might be forbidden to AI slop, but the front page is alive and well.
Unless Trump declares another war so we can keep the front page busy with that.
Show HN might be forbidden to AI slop, but the front page is alive and well.
This piece appears to be a response to [my recent essay on craft, alienation, and LLMs][1], so let me engage with it directly.
The argument collapses every social and structural explanation into a single move: the individual chose it. This is the classic libertarian reduction, and it has a well-known failure mode. Under this framework, there is no coherent distinction between a choice made under duress and a choice made freely. If a developer uses LLM coding assistants because their livelihood depends on keeping pace with colleagues who do, and the author's response is that no one forced them, well, no one forces a person at gunpoint to hand over their wallet either. The gun is still there.
The author acknowledges, mid-essay, that the system “can change incentives and tradeoffs.” But this is precisely what a structural analysis is. Once you admit that incentives can be arranged such that a person has no viable path except the one the system rewards, you have already conceded the core Marxian point. Calling it “alienation” or not is just terminology.
What the alienation framework actually claims is not that individuals don't choose. It's that the conditions under which those choices are made matter morally and analytically. My own essay is careful about this: I noted explicitly that the tension between craft and efficiency doesn't vanish under different political arrangements. The question survives capitalism; capitalism just answers it harshly. Dismissing this as a “denial of the craftsman” misreads the argument.
On LLM capabilities: the claim that none of these problems can be solved by LLMs (understanding systems, architecture decisions, debugging) reads as confident as of roughly two years ago. The frontier has moved. Coding agents are already handling non-trivial architectural reasoning in constrained domains, and the trajectory is visible. Anchoring the argument to current limitations, stated as permanent ones, is a move that ages badly.
[1]: https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/craft-alienation-llm...
The argument collapses every social and structural explanation into a single move: the individual chose it. This is the classic libertarian reduction, and it has a well-known failure mode. Under this framework, there is no coherent distinction between a choice made under duress and a choice made freely. If a developer uses LLM coding assistants because their livelihood depends on keeping pace with colleagues who do, and the author's response is that no one forced them, well, no one forces a person at gunpoint to hand over their wallet either. The gun is still there.
The author acknowledges, mid-essay, that the system “can change incentives and tradeoffs.” But this is precisely what a structural analysis is. Once you admit that incentives can be arranged such that a person has no viable path except the one the system rewards, you have already conceded the core Marxian point. Calling it “alienation” or not is just terminology.
What the alienation framework actually claims is not that individuals don't choose. It's that the conditions under which those choices are made matter morally and analytically. My own essay is careful about this: I noted explicitly that the tension between craft and efficiency doesn't vanish under different political arrangements. The question survives capitalism; capitalism just answers it harshly. Dismissing this as a “denial of the craftsman” misreads the argument.
On LLM capabilities: the claim that none of these problems can be solved by LLMs (understanding systems, architecture decisions, debugging) reads as confident as of roughly two years ago. The frontier has moved. Coding agents are already handling non-trivial architectural reasoning in constrained domains, and the trajectory is visible. Anchoring the argument to current limitations, stated as permanent ones, is a move that ages badly.
[1]: https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/craft-alienation-llm...
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They know they can eschew AI and code the way they did before, but they fear that there will be little or no money to be made doing it. They fear that they won't be able to continue to have a career that supports them doing the work they did before in the way they used to do it.
These folks may be upset because they portend that the market dynamics will force them to either use AI and make money or not use AI and make no money.