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?

The Death of the Software Craftsman

The Death of the Software Craftsman

Naildrivin' 5 - Website of David Bryant Copeland
@davetron5000 In case you find it helpful, the "All In" Problem #2 you mentioned can be ameliorated by cloning your dependencies' source code and putting them in reach of a coding agent. I've found it extremely helpful for using niche technologies with LLM-augmented programming.
@kerrick why clone dependencies? You can tell it to read the dependency source code installed via `bundle show`. Or are you just never even installing dependencies in your workflow?
@soulcutter I gained the habit working in JS apps, where node_modules often contains minified code. I kept the habit in Ruby because my dependencies included Rust libraries. I still enjoy the habit in pure-Ruby software because sometimes the repo contains docs and examples not included in the packaged gem, and sometimes the git history of the repo can be helpful.

@kerrick I guess. It could just as easily mislead imo.

And there remains the problem that it still goes down dumb deadends because of training data lag - recently I’ve seen complaints about minitest mocks being extracted and how it repeatedly tried to remove the (correct) mock dependency because the training data thought it was integrated. It is frustrating that it is a seemingly inevitable side-effect of how it works that it repeats bonehead errors like that

@kerrick these are things you end up doing to correct its bad behavior. There’s a thousand cuts of them
@kerrick fwiw I’m not fully anti or fully for, I think I’m in some reasonable middle ground. I use it. The all-in perspective somehow looks past these things, or gets excited about sharing how they configure the tool for each point of friction. I think a lot has shifted from understanding code to understanding the latest tool configuration strategy. Idk