Anyone Else Feeling Like They're Losing Their Craft to AI?
Anyone Else Feeling Like They're Losing Their Craft to AI?
There is a specific kind of grief that comes from watching an AI write in 30 seconds what took you years to learn. Not anger. Not fear about job security. Just a quiet sense of loss - the thing you were good at does not require being good at it anymore.
The Craft Grief Is Real
You spent a decade understanding memory management, writing elegant algorithms, debugging race conditions at 2am. That knowledge shaped your identity as an engineer. Now an AI agent generates correct-enough code from a one-line prompt, and the junior dev who has been coding for six months ships features at the same pace you do.
It is not that you are less capable. It is that the bar for "capable enough" dropped dramatically.
The Low-Level Bits Still Feel Like Craft
Here is the thing - the parts of programming that feel most like craft are exactly the parts AI still struggles with. Understanding why a system behaves unexpectedly. Designing architectures that will survive three years of changing requirements. Knowing when not to build something.
Debugging a gnarly distributed systems issue still requires deep understanding. Profiling performance bottlenecks still requires intuition about how hardware works. These skills did not become less valuable - they became more valuable because fewer people are developing them.
The Shift Is in What Counts
The craft is not gone. It moved. Instead of crafting individual functions, you are crafting systems. Instead of writing code, you are writing specifications that agents execute. The skill is in knowing what to build, how to decompose it, and how to verify the output.
That is still craft. It just looks different than it did five years ago. The grief is valid, but the skills transfer more than you think.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.