State of the Field
"Are you a builder or a craftsman? You should think about that."
This was asked of me recently by another senior+ engineer, someone with more than fifteen years in the field. We were talking about AI and how we actually use the tools, and I mentioned my distrust of spinning up 8 sub-agents unsupervised and shipping them straight to prod. But the more people I talk to, the more normal that turns out to be: enormous pipelines handing the whole job over to autonomous systems. The trust engineers used to never even extend to each other, we now hand to machines that get it right maybe 80% of the time. It's... baffling.
Overall... the field has gotten weird.
At the time of writing, I have been a professional SWE for 8 years now, almost a decade. I consider myself a tradesman, if perhaps a highly educated one. In that time I've watched the explosion of SaaS jobs in 2020-2022, watched the fallout of SVB crashing and the 0% interest era drying up for tech, and now I'm watching an entire generation of junior programmers smash into a glass wall: layoffs paired with senior engineers using AI tools to replace whole teams (time will tell how that one goes...).
It's been a growing feeling for months now, of watching the AI companies battle, of low subscriptions swapping to tokenized systems, of personal agents rise and fall in a month, or companies spin up thousands of agents despite how crippled their underlying vulnerabilities are. It's a lot like in the last four years, everyone has lost their minds, and I don't really understand it.
And it's all landing at a time when a lot of choices about how we write software are rearing their heads. Next.js has dominance over a large chunk of the web, and now people are realizing their server-side components have security holes. Hosting plans for the cloud have grown inordinately expensive, and it seems like you need a PhD in finance to understand the pricing plans of GCP and by extension, AWS and Azure. AI is writing 80% of the code, and getting 40% of it wrong, and vibe coding is in abundance.
Overall, it makes me feel like an old man shouting at the clouds. "No," I want to say, "we should be more careful. We should take more time. We should care."
So, builder or craftsman? I'm a builder. But somewhere along the way I came to believe the two were never really separate. Programming is a trade, like carpentry, or plumbing. We take things, and then we build them. We've been handed the equivalent of early power tools in the form of LLMs and agentic harnesses, but I don't believe they're there yet. Close. Not quite yet.
This leads me to a point. These AI tools are incredible, but if I wanted someone to build me a house, I would want them to not have a machine design the architecture without supervision. I wouldn't want it to then take it and work without supervision to create this structure, of tacking pieces of other house designs willy-nilly all over the place. I want some damn craftsmanship! Software in America is a highly paid field. A developer with ~6 years under their belt can clear 170 to 190 thousand dollars. This is a lot of money for slop.
This is an open letter to care a little more. These tools are incredible, yes. But using them too much results in codebases that nobody understands, and the AI will have to maintain forever, trusting the pricing model remains sane. And it won't.