Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, I think there's more engineering in fast fashion and more crafting in bespoke clothing. With food, more engineering in the food items you'd find at a gas station and more crafting at a restaurant.
The vocabulary point matters: calling careful work artisanal turns reliability into a personal taste when it is often the core engineering requirement.
Isn't there a difference between making things that code does and the code itself? Ive seen truly beautiful software with terrible to follow but effective code and I've seen beautiful code that while technically amazing didn't do anything of substance. Software is like woodworking, it includes all levels of care and product outcomes.
I find more pleasure and satisfaction by programming at a higher altitude, at the system level. This zooming out gives you a better feel for building an effective scaffold and you can iterate on ideas faster.
I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure.
On the plus side, they're usually promoted very quickly to management and never code again.
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away.
The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally.
You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.
Weirdly, I thought the terms would be reversed… I think of a craftsman as someone who values quality over quantity, and makes everything beautiful and long lasting, while an engineer is more about productivity and tolerances and efficiency. A craftsman makes better quality but doesn’t scale the way an engineer and the factory process does, although mass produced goods sacrifice quality for quantity.
It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, I think there's more engineering in fast fashion and more crafting in bespoke clothing. With food, more engineering in the food items you'd find at a gas station and more crafting at a restaurant.
The vocabulary point matters: calling careful work artisanal turns reliability into a personal taste when it is often the core engineering requirement.
Isn't there a difference between making things that code does and the code itself? Ive seen truly beautiful software with terrible to follow but effective code and I've seen beautiful code that while technically amazing didn't do anything of substance. Software is like woodworking, it includes all levels of care and product outcomes.
I find more pleasure and satisfaction by programming at a higher altitude, at the system level. This zooming out gives you a better feel for building an effective scaffold and you can iterate on ideas faster.
Fully agree with this, careful work is foundationally engineering. Slopping and not reviewing work is not.
I would call myself an artisanal programmer. Software Engineers are some of the least likable people I've ever met and being associated with them is cringe. Questions like, "Why are you using Notepad++ instead of using VSCode with 100+ plugins?" in a very condescending manner gets old very quickly. They need the title of Engineer because deep down they are very insecure.
On the plus side, they're usually promoted very quickly to management and never code again.
Couldn't take an article seriously that started with the author claiming that code he writes by hand is "100% correct"
Bruh
I've gone back over most of my contributions to open source using LLMs and honestly, even though it was my best work at the time, there are big gaps that they find right away.
The myth that we've been shipping perfect code for years, but you can't trust LLMs, is just subjective blindness. People can't see the issues that they can't see, definitionally.
You can absolutely use the exact techniques we used to use in "the old days" to produce reliable code with LLMs generating most of it. The issue is, it's really not a lot less conceptual and intellectual effort than in "the old days", at root. You speed up the programming part, but the rest is still a hard slog, so nobody is out here doing really thorough testing in ways we used to dream of.