New post: "We mourn our craft" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
No comment on this one.
Discussion
Loading...
@nolan @marcoarment “The worst fact about these tools is that they work”—for now. Just like the LLMs that scrape web content (often illegally) to generate “art” and “words” the code scrapers will run out of new code and start ‘training’ on LLM generated code. Resulting in garbage output.
Or the data centres will have consumed all our power and water and folks won’t be thinking about coding…
@nolan @getajobmike can I at least note how stupidly absurdly inefficient these tools are? not (only) the data gathering or training process only. but that even the most trivial change requires 10+ api calls to a server. sure it's faster than me but at the cost of using electricity like it's free of impact or cost when it isn't, not even when it's solar or wind.
and sure they'll make it all run locally maybe. but it won't erase the abuse of people it took to get us here.
@nolan Yeah, the machine can output code. Should it? Nope!
This is like the definition of defeatist. Why not try to care? It’s very clear from your post that you don’t actually like it but you feel that the writing is on the wall and that’s just the way things are. I refuse. They say to choose your battles, and battling the technofascists seems like a pretty good choice.
@nolan The age old battle. Execs and VCs are Capital. Programmers are Labor. Lots of conflict between those two a hundred years ago that we somehow forgot. 🫠
@nolan I don't know, man. "Wait six months" has been a common refrain on HN and it has historically not aged well.
@varx Honestly, you don't even need 6 months. The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed.
@nolan I can't speak to what I haven't seen, and I can't take people's word for this stuff because there's a *massive* amount of hype.
Just endless waves of dubious benchmarks, demos that turn out to be fake or broken, reporting that isn't actually fact-based.
So, I can only speak to what I've seen.
And what I've seen ain't good.
@nolan Importantly, this was also the situation a year ago, and a year ago people also said "just wait six months". And I did, and it's fundamentally the same situation.
The agents can produce more code, larger projects. But that's actually worse because that's even harder to fix and maintain.
@varx I get the skepticism; there is a lot of junk and bunk out there. My experience comes from working at a small startup where people are already pushing the boundaries of multi-agent orchestrations and whatnot.
I tried to cover this in a recent post; I think my experiment is pretty conclusive. Honestly you could try the experiment yourself with newer models or more loops and probably make the number shoot up: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/31/building-a-browser-api-in-one-shot/
@nolan I read that post (I follow the RSS feed) but there's a really important point that you don't seem to cover:
Is that code usable?
It passes a lot of tests. Is it good enough to use in a real browser? (Functionality, performance, security.) Is it easy enough to work with that you could get it into good enough shape to use? Is it maintainable? *How do you know?*
1 more replies (not shown)
@nolan My experience with this is it depends on how the developer viewed what they did.
For some it was a craft as you describe it. Finding the perfect solution.
For others, it was about delivering a product vision. Solving customer problems.
The latter (like me) is less bothered by this future we now live in. Because it was never about the code. It was about the result.
I used to type in listings from magazines. I didn’t enjoy it. I just wanted to play the game.
In a word: no.
I refuse to give up when the research is coming back saying that use of these tools degrades the quality of the work, that they cause brain damage which may be permanent, that they rely on theft and disregard for provenance.
If that's because I'm also a 40-something, so be it.
@nolan I tried to leave a comment on this, but wordpress seems to eat my comments, so I'll send it here:
I still use Pinafore as my main fediverse client. Not Semaphore, not Enaphore, and not any other fork that was made since. Admittedly, part of why I still use it is because I don't want to go through the admittedly easy process of logging into my accounts again. But the other reason is sentimentality.
Pinafore, in my opinion, is the best fediverse client. I think that, becuase it the product of being very mindful about what should or shouldn't be used in the code, what features should or shouldn't be implemented, and even just the simple fact that the person who worked on it cared. You showed that you cared by maintaining it. By adding accessibility features and performance improvements. I think you showed care through your labor by making pinafore run well on KaiOS—I still remember that, I think that was cool as hell.
I still remember the first of just two small commits that I contributed to pinafore. This was to allow you to switch instances quicker by adding a "star" button to each item in the instance list. You took the time to review it, even fixing my code after merging, and made sure I was credited in the release notes. I've contributed to a number of FOSS projects, usually drive-by commits, and very few of them have been as welcoming as how you'd managed pinafore. That sticks with a person.
Sure, maybe in six months I could vibe-code my own pinafore. Maybe I could do that now. But I would never have met you, and you would never have met me. The craft gave us the opportunity to work together, however briefly, on something shared. I think that matters.
I got to see what kind of developer I want to be in you. I want to value performance and accessibility. I want my open source projects to be welcoming and enriching to whoever contributes. I want to learn from others what their wants and needs are for software, and to work with them to make that shared vision real.
I just don't see how we'll ever be able to achieve this if all we're doing is toiling, quietly and alone, in front of an LLM's text prompt. I don't know how we can ever learn what is valuable, what we should even type into that text prompt, if we hadn't already done some of that menial labour ourselves. I don't know how we could ever learn what matters if we don't talk to each other, work with each other, raise each other up, etc.. etc..
All I really want to say to you is this: don't lose sight of what code actually is. It is a model of reality. It's a representation of our wants and needs. You can't make a model of reality if you don't know what reality is, and we only have two eyes and two ears, and there's much more to reality than we can ever observe or experience ourselves. We have to learn from each other, learn how to listen, learn how to distill all those wants down into code, into those sets of instructions for the silicon to run.
That is the craft. And you can't do it alone.
@suricrasia I replied on my blog, and I really appreciated your kind words! Our humanity will endure, and I will try not to lose sight of it. Thank you for the lovely way you expressed it.
@nolan reading the comments on your blog, and to a lesser extent here, I’m struck (again) by how many experienced engineers keep their heads in the sand about how good this technology is, and how fast it’s improving.
“It’s not a better coder than me.” “We’ll always have to review their code.” Today - maybe. Tomorrow? Not a chance.
@richard5mith @gregr I understand it only because I was there with them until a year ago. At this point, I can't deny the evidence of my eyes. That doesn't make it any less painful.
@nolan @richard5mith @gregr Right with you, tool use a year ago changed everything. Obviously more since then.
If this technology launched with the 2025 versions of the product vs 2023 there would be a lot less very smart people being willfully ignorant.
I don’t say this as a whole hearted blind endorsement, but nevertheless I believe it to be true.
It is painful, for many reasons.
@dotsie @richard5mith @gregr Yep exactly although in retrospect the 2023 version was already quite capable. I refused to believe it until it became clear that you just needed to chain enough of these dumb things together to do what I do. To their credit, I had colleagues who saw this much earlier than me.
@nolan @richard5mith @gregr Right with you, tool use a year ago changed everything. Obviously more since then.
If this technology launched with the 2025 versions of the product vs 2023 there would be a lot less very smart people being willfully ignorant.
I don’t say this as a whole hearted blind endorsement, but nevertheless I believe it to be true.
It is painful, for many reasons.
@nolan As a translator, I feel the pain...
@nolan
1) there's no way that the people using the mockup-generating machines actually understand their mockup codebases to anywhere near the degree as people who actually spent time thinking about the problems and their solutions.
2) if we could ban asbestos, then we can ban these horrible destructive machines. We can organize, and we can have them all dismantled, and their DRAM & CPUs can be put to less-destructive use.
@nolan
3) we have no convincing reason to tolerate defeatism anymore. With examples like the Mamdani administration, we can all see that there is no excuse.
https://sfba.social/@vij/116014712128853121
We *can* switch off the orphan-shredding machine, and we must.
@nolan i've never made this request to anyone before in my life, but... in this moment, defeatism like that amounts to advocating compliance in advance. And it may actually convince some people to give up before they even think about the necessity of resistance. And that could result in a weaker resistance. For this reason, i sincerely but respectfully urge you to consider deleting that blog post.
@JamesWidman I get where you're coming from. To be clear: this post is not really a plea to anyone in my audience to stop resisting, become a "collaborator," etc. It's really a conversation between me and myself from a ~year ago. You can make of it what you will.
@nolan @dgregor79 Wonderful piece, Nolan. 🙏🏼
I dunno. I kinda agree, but I don't see LLMs churning out anything particularly good. They're just text search, they can only *reproduce*, and a lot of the 'comp sci' of the last 30 years is pure hooey, and it's all there in the training models.
When things like Rust appear, and actually run at the speeds that things *should* run at on modern hardware, it reminds me not everybody out there is an idiot.
At the point where software can innovate, we'll be debating conciousness. Again.
@megatronicthronbanks Just the other day a coworker sent me a Rust-based C compiler that Anthropic built, which is apparently capable of compiling the Linux kernel: https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler
I understand where you're coming from, but it really feels like game over to me at this point.
@nolan @megatronicthronbanks I don't think this is the slam dunk Anthropic seems to think it is. This isn't vibe coding, it's a carefully constructed workflow (made by humans), then passed through an ocean boiling amount of tokens to provide a subpar result that's basically unmaintainable. The fact that it kinda works is impressive (I guess?), if you value magic tricks more than maintainable software that works reliably.
@nolan @marcoarment but do they work? currently, a lot of people want them to work. but do they actually work?
@nolan Here's what I don't get. You talk about being able to produce 10x the code using an agent. But in an earlier Lobsters thread (https://lobste.rs/c/bnujxj), you said that it's actually a modest improvement. Maybe it feels more dramatic than it is because, as you said in that same post, you're swimming in the culture.
@numist @matt Yep exactly, this is what I was going to say. I'm fractionally more productive today, but I can already see that my biggest bottleneck is trying to run more than 3 damn instances of Claude Code in my terminal when my web app uses one port and the codebase is shared and my laptop only has so much CPU/RAM. These are all dumb and easily solvable problems with more agents running in containers, and every company is madly scrambling to try to build that.
@nolan @matt Even today your mileage depends on what you're using them for. I don't expect today's tools to beat me at navigating hairy technical/political problems at work, but there's lots of my day to day that's annoyingly mechanical—but just out of reach of a shell script—that I've already been able to completely automate away in the past six months.
Consider where we were in 2014 (and what that implies for 2038): https://xkcd.com/1425/
@nolan I honestly wish you're wrong, that we'll be known as "the people that got scared by AI for a bit", but I fear very much that won't be the case. Though I do not share all your beliefs/thoughts regarding how good AI is/will (ever?) be.
My deepest fear is the "craft" side. My hobby, my dearest love. My GitHub profile was up there showing my work, without any doubt, but now? Now it might be AI. Who knows?
When I wanted to write something and reached an area or a feature that was unconventional, I would dive deep. I would learn everything around and understand it deeply, to its core. Sleep was optional
Is that gone? Is that a phase? Am I getting old and tired (even though I've just reached 30)? What will become of my hobby? Of my code? Of my love for the craft...
@dzervas This is exactly where I'm at. I covered this a bit in a recent post (https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/31/building-a-browser-api-in-one-shot/) where I marveled at how, with one prompt, I could build someone that previously would have been a proud open source project for me, with stars and issues and PRs and all the rest, but now… I just don't care. It's disposable. Anybody can create another one on-demand. I don't even know what to do with my open source code anymore.
@nolan I share much of your discouragement but anticipate a happier continuation of coding than you seem to fear
Your post mentions oil painting, a hobby still enjoyed by millions of people. Last week my wife and I tried a pottery wheel class; it was fun.
I think the fact coding can be immensely fun will prevent it from becoming an archeological curiosity. Whether the *profession* of coding remains fun is unclear, but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy the *craft* of coding for the rest of my life
@JanMiksovsky Sure yes, I believe a new craft will replace the current one, and that the two will share a lot of similarities. I am not a total doomer, but this post was for me to grapple with my sadness, so I allowed it to be a bit melancholy. I have plenty of colleagues who are totally gung-ho about the new craft and have no sentimentalism for the old craft, but that's just not me. 😅
@nolan thank you so much for this. I’m mourning with you.
@nolan I think I picked a good time to retire.
@thereisnocat In my darker moments I am not unhappy to be near the tail end of my career.