by codeman001 on 4/22/25, 10:46 AM with 93 comments
by ericyd on 4/22/25, 12:52 PM
by bobbyraduloff on 4/22/25, 1:05 PM
I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors.
People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.
by JSR_FDED on 4/22/25, 1:29 PM
It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.
by o1o1o1 on 4/22/25, 5:31 PM
> In a world pushing for “reflexive AI usage,” I’m advocating for something different: thoughtful, intentional collaboration with AI that preserves the essence of coding as a craft. > ... > Like Rocky, we sometimes need to step away from the comfortable, civilized environment and return to the old gym – the place where real growth happens through struggle, persistence, and focused practice.
> Because coding isn’t just about output. It’s about the journey of becoming better problem solvers, better thinkers, and better engineers. And some journeys can’t be outsourced, even to the most advanced AI.
But here’s the reality: those ideals feel increasingly out of reach. Business demands and short-term thinking rarely leave room for “intentional” or “thoughtful” work. For many of us, having time to grow as engineers is a luxury.
Worse, it’s often personal. I’ve had to carry the weight for friends in crisis, pretending two people were working just to help someone keep their job. It’s brutal—and sadly, not rare.
As AI gets more buzz, many stakeholders now think our work is overvalued. A quick AI PoC becomes “good enough” in their eyes, and we’re expected to polish it into something real—fast, cheap, and under pressure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly defending our craft against the next threat of being replaced by “cheaper” labor.
When I started out, we cared about clean code and craftsmanship. Now, I feel like I should be taking sales courses just to survive.
Today, it’s all about output. Ship faster or get replaced. Quality only matters when it’s too late—after the person who made the bad call has already cashed out.
I know this sounds pessimistic, but for many of us who aren’t in the top 1% of this industry, it’s just reality.
Thanks for the article, Christian. You’re not wrong—but I think you’re one of the few lucky enough to live that perspective. I wish you all the best, and hope you can keep enjoying that rare luxury. There will be a need for true craftsmen—especially when the rest of us have gone numb just trying to keep up.
by jstummbillig on 4/22/25, 1:34 PM
Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction.
But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails.
Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.
by juujian on 4/22/25, 1:25 PM
by spacemadness on 4/22/25, 3:53 PM
“Who cares, ship it, also we need this new feature next week. What do you mean it will take longer this time? Ridiculous, why didn’t you say something before?”
Likewise, the brainrot and lost knowledge, as well as possible new tech debt that fewer engineers working in their codebase understand, will eventually cause issues down the line. The same pressures will ensue causing stakeholders to ignore all the signs of degradation.
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 on 4/22/25, 2:13 PM
Thing is, this is probably 99% of the programming work of a junior dev at a place where management thinks like that.
by cjs_ac on 4/22/25, 12:16 PM
Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant that phrase, but 'reflexive AI usage' has two conflicting meanings - it can be AI usage that is either actively or passively chosen - and we might need some better phrasing around this.
by shinycode on 4/22/25, 12:18 PM
People for which development is not their job will absolutely want to get rid of it as much as possible because it costs money. I really agree with the author, it does feel like a regression and it’s so easy to overlook what makes the most part of the job when it looks like it can be fully automated. Once you don’t have people who are used to do what’s quoted, and there is 500 million lines of code and bugs, good luck with that to ask a human to take a look. Maybe AI will be powerful enough to help debugging but it’s a dangerous endeavor to build critical business around that. If for any reason (political or else) AI got more expensive it could kill businesses (twitter api ?)
by elia_42 on 4/22/25, 4:01 PM
Today every type of problem and every type of solution seems to have to be solved with AI, when there are more creative, original and artisanal ways to solve them (even if, sometimes, they need more time and patience)
by strangescript on 4/22/25, 12:45 PM
by lo_fye on 4/22/25, 1:38 PM
What if every time you had an Aha! moment, you blogged about it in detail. Many people do. AI ingests those blog posts. It uses what they say when writing new code, or assessing existing code. It does use hard-won knowledge; it just wasn't hard-won by AI itself.
by boredemployee on 4/22/25, 12:33 PM
I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late.
didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years?
Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almost volunteer work because the vast majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment, especially with AI flooding the music platforms, so I really expect it to happen to many other jobs.
by TheChaplain on 4/22/25, 12:39 PM
At the same time, as AI takes over the actual coding practice more and more, I find the situation with multiple programming languages a waste of resources.
If AI could generate binaries, web assembly directly, or even some "AI specific bytecode" then we could skip the steps in the middle and save a ton of energy.
by codr7 on 4/22/25, 2:20 PM
Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction.
Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill.
Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there.
Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp.
Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain.
Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead.
Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...
by lm28469 on 4/22/25, 12:22 PM