Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through.
This one, for instance:
> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.
Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"
Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!
A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!
> Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so
This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well.
My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.
I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about software explicitly not being a craft for many years now and life keeps getting in the way. It's a direct response to the Etsy engineering blog, "Code As Craft". I agree that there are more code craftsmen in general than before, but by percentage there's way more software engineers. Engineering best practices to me are in many ways about robbing coding and software from the mystique of craftsmanship and turning it into a repeatable industrial process that isn't inhumane per se but doesn't depend on any particular person to make it work.
I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.
>Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults.
This is the opposite of my experience. I find websites take much more time to load, are designed to require many more actions and interaction time to navigate, often break and are replaced by a blank page if any error occurs, use huge numbers of ad/tracking requests and JS, and are filled with accessibility-standard-violating unnecessary JS animations.
> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.
That is not remotely the case. All software, not just websites, is a lot worse than it was 10 years ago. Bloated, slow, buggy messes that resulted from the industry hiring a bunch of people who just wanted to do the bare minimum and make fat stacks, rather than hiring people who actually care about good engineering.
It's just not what I wanted. I got into software because I liked coding, deep technical understanding only excited me because it would help me code better. I don't want to get too "woe is me", there are far worse things in the world than having a vaguely unsatisfying job, but there are life choices I would have made differently had I known coding would be automated in 2026.
This one, for instance:
> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.
Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"
Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!