Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was invisible:

Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

The tools didn't create a division; they simply revealed an existing one.

Orchard himself belongs to the first camp. He learned BASIC at age seven not because BASIC was beautiful but because he wanted things to happen on screen. For him, LLM coding assistants are just another rung on the same ladder he's always been climbing. The puzzle didn't disappear; it moved to a higher level of abstraction. He grieves, but what he grieves is the ecosystem around the work, not the work itself.

Nolan Lawson grieves differently:

We'll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We'll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We'll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good.

His post reads like an elegy, and the grief in it is real. What he's mourning is the act itself.

Two developers, both thoughtful, both honest, looking at the same moment and feeling different things. That asymmetry is worth taking seriously, because it points to something the “just adapt” conversation keeps missing.

Alienated from the act

Marx identified four dimensions of alienated labor: separation from the product of one's work, from the act of working itself, from other people, and from one's own human capacities. In the context of LLM coding assistants, the second of these is doing most of the work.

What Marx meant by separation from the act is something like this. Humans, unlike other animals, can imagine what they want to make before they make it and then shape the material world to match that image. This capacity for conscious, intentional creation is close to what Marx considered distinctively human. When work is reduced to something mechanical, coerced, endured rather than inhabited, that capacity goes unused. The activity is still happening; the person is just no longer really present in it.

The craft-lovers mourning their work fit this description. What they valued wasn't the output. It was the process of building something, the hours of close attention, the feeling of understanding a system well enough to reshape it. Lawson says as much: the GitHub repo that says “I made this.” Not “something was made” but I made it.

This also explains why the two camps feel so differently about the same tools. Orchard never invested his sense of self in the act of writing code. He invested it in the result. When LLM coding assistants let him get to the result faster, nothing essential is lost for him. For Lawson, the act was where the meaning lived. LLM coding assistants don't bypass the output; they bypass the part he cared about. Marx's distinction between objective alienation (a condition that exists regardless of whether you feel it) and subjective alienation (experiencing the loss) maps almost exactly onto this split. Orchard isn't subjectively alienated because he was never objectively attached to the act in the first place. Lawson is both.

The usual response is that this is nostalgia, or that new crafts will emerge to replace the old ones. Maybe. But that response sidesteps the actual question: why are people who love coding being pushed away from coding? Nobody is stopping them from writing code by hand. The market is penalizing them for it.

Who's doing the penalizing

In Capital, Marx wrote about the Luddite movement:

It took time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments.

The workers who destroyed the looms weren't wrong to be angry. The direction was off. Capital extended working hours, not the loom. Capital turned workers into appendages of the machine, not the loom. The distinction matters because it changes what the actual problem is, and therefore what might be done about it.

When a developer explains that their productivity is being measured against colleagues who use LLM coding assistants, and that they're using them because they need the job, not because they want to, the source of alienation is plain. It isn't the LLM coding assistant. It's the structure that ties livelihood to a metric, and that metric now favors whoever produces the most output the fastest. The LLM coding assistant is the lever; the market is the mechanism.

One caveat matters here. The tension between craft and efficiency doesn't disappear if you remove capitalism from the picture. LLM coding assistants produce faster results whether anyone is being paid or not, and any community, however it's organized, will eventually have to reckon with what to do with that speed difference. Capitalism gives the harshest possible answer to that question: the slower worker loses their livelihood. But the question itself would survive capitalism. Other forms of social organization might answer it more gently, but they'd still have to answer it.

What my situation reveals

I maintain open source software full time. My income comes entirely from public funding: grants, foundations, institutional support. I have no employer who can tell me to use LLM coding assistants or lose my job. No quarterly review where my output gets compared to a colleague's.

Under these conditions, my relationship with LLM coding assistants is nothing like what Lawson describes. I still write the code I find interesting by hand. The parts I don't want to do, the verbose test scaffolding and boilerplate I've written a hundred times, I hand to the model. The division follows a line I drew myself, between work that expresses something and work that just needs to happen.

This is close to what Marx imagined machinery could do in conditions other than capitalism: relieve people of repetitive labor so they could do something more fully human with the time. The same tool can feel liberating in one set of conditions and alienating in another.

My situation is unusual, and it exists inside a capitalist economy, a partial shelter rather than an escape. I'm not presenting it as a solution, only as evidence of that difference.

Where the grief should look

Knowing the source of a problem doesn't dissolve it. The developers being pushed toward LLM coding assistants they don't want to use are facing a real constraint right now, and a structural analysis doesn't help them this afternoon.

But it does change the question. If the grief Lawson describes is real (and I think it is), and if its deeper cause lies in the social relations around the technology rather than the technology itself, then the right target for that grief isn't the LLM coding assistant. It's whatever forces people to use tools they don't want to use, on terms they didn't choose.

Lawson gestures in this direction too:

I don't celebrate the new world, but I also don't resist it. The sun rises, the sun sets, I orbit helplessly around it, and my protests can't stop it.

That's honest. But I'd like to think resignation isn't the only option.