Dave Copeland 
The Death of a Software Craftsman (it happens a lot 'round here)
https://naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/02/23/the-death-of-the-software-craftsman.html
AI Abstinence? All in on Agents? Or resign yourself to becoming a niche craftsperson?
Coraline Ada Ehmke@davetron5000 I hate this timeline. I left corporate tech in 2021, and it would have been hard enough to return had not this rug-pull pulled this particular rug. Now I can only code on passion projects or grant-funded work I guess.
I still care about code. Writing code is transformative, and I don't want to lose that. So for me, I guess it's option 3: Embrace Tradition. (But I'm still not calling myself a "craftsman".)
@CoralineAda I have been a depressive haze for the last few months because of this. I'm not sure if writing this post helps, but I think it does. Though still not sure what this means for me personally.
Craft{er,sman,sperson} - I don't love the term, but "maker" doesn't seem right to me, nor does "artisan", but maybe it's just "coder"?
@davetron5000 We could recoup “software architect”?
@CoralineAda true - that is such a dirty word to me, but maybe it could be turned around!
Tim M@davetron5000 @CoralineAda I always liked "s/w architect" as something like "the designer of the core structure and abstractions of a s/w project in order to champion the true longterm needs of the users who may not be able to fully articulate those needs", and not its modern meaning of "person who chooses which pub-sub tool to use and which database abstraction to put on top of which RDBMS".
@davetron5000 @CoralineAda The architect is the person who can say no to a shortcut or design decision if it short-changes what the user actually requires. And as such, the project manager <--> architect relationship should be a productive dynamic of tension due to to pulling in almost opposite directions, to ensure that both can play their role correctly... on a good project they complement (and compliment) each other in the interest of the end-user/client
Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)@CoralineAda @davetron5000 or perhaps “software poet” 😄
Sam Livingston-Gray@jaredwhite @CoralineAda @davetron5000 iirc very early versions of rails docs had examples of a "David" whose job was "code poet"
I thread this particular needle by changing the noun to a verb, which, not coincidentally, helps separate action from identity: I write software. I clean up messes. I help the people around me learn to do those things.
Jason Garber@davetron5000 “Professional” is right there.
Anyone proactively deskilling themselves by feeding at the slop bucket is behaving unprofessionally—never mind unethically and engaging in class war against their fellow laborers—and should be considered thusly.
@jgarber I dunno, "professional" as something like "accredited" (like in real engineering) would be nice, but since there is no accreditation it feels too ambiguous (esp when a more general definition is just "gets paid").
NGL, I have a feeling the end state will be "engineer" == "writes markdown for AI" and "coder" == "writes code the old fashioned way" and the class-distinctive difference of those two words would not be an accident :(
@davetron5000 Can we just call sloperators "dipshits" or "chumps" or something? Hard to be taken seriously when everyone's calling you a chump. 😂
Oinak @davetron5000 @CoralineAda code luthier, software taylor, computer mason, codesmith?
@oinak @davetron5000 “hand-coder” is straightforward at least.
Kerrick Long (code)@davetron5000 I went through a similar haze, which ended in late December for me. It's really hard to describe in a few words why the following doesn't match the experience I have with LLM-augmented coding using certain tools (not most!):
> “coding” by writing Markdown and feeding it to a compiler that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t until I ask it nicely to do what I need.
Instead, it feels more like a weird form of rapid-fire software design iteration, like whiteboarding but in code.
@kerrick My limited experience is that it's anything but rapid, but I have not gone deep on any of this.