I heard somebody on TikTok say this:

  "if you haven't mourned the death of coding as a craft, you were never
  good at it."

There was a time maybe from like 1995 or so until 2025 where if you had
the time and energy and aptitude, you could make a good living in tech.

I feel like it's the same thing that happened to carpentry.  The vast
majority of products we have are things like what you get from Ikea.

Very few of us have custom-made furniture in our houses.

There was a time when all furniture was custom-made.  All bookshelves,
all dining tables, all dressers, etc.  All built by hand from raw
materials.

Now we buy boxes of flat-packed stuff and we assemble it.

Coding agents are similar for code.

The workflow in a software company up until about 2025 looked like this:

Somebody writes a ticket, like:

  Allow people to log in to our web app using Google SSO (single
  sign-in).

  Add a button "Sign in with Google!" to the login page, above the
  "email and password" form.  Use the attached mockup for details about
  the font and images used.

  Record in the database how somebody logs in (Google SSO vs email and
  password).

And then that gets handed to a senior programmer.  That person maybe
adds some technical details and then often hands it off to a junior
programmer who writes the code.  The senior programmer might answer some
questions.

The code gets installed on a server and a tester verifies it works, and
tries out lots of wacky stuff to break it, such as:

  - use a weird email address
  - use all sorts of strange browsers or old phones

Maybe the tester kicks it back to the programmer with a list of bugs
they found, and then the programmer fixes the bugs, and asks the tester
to check again.

Then after testing succeeds, the code gets deployed to the real server
where real customers use it.

Here's the cast of characters around 2006:

1.  Somebody with a title like "Product Designer" wrote the original
    ticket.

2.  A senior programmer / engineer that coaches the junior and explains
    all the undocumented details in the in-house systems.

3.  A junior programmer that does the work and handles the bug reports

4.  The tester

5.  The devops engineer that takes the code and deploys it into the
    production servers.

Now, this is what the workflow looks like (in general):

The product designer writes the ticket and sends it into a coding agent
directly.  The coding agent has a testing server that it installs the
code into maybe 15 minutes later.  The product designer tries it out,
and then tells the coding agent to deploy it.

If something blows up in production, then the product designer might ask
the senior programmer to look at it.  Most of the time, the coding agent
gets these things right though!

The industry has decided that less testing is OK.  The product designer
accepts that maybe the product won't look exactly

It's a bit like how when you buy groceries at Walmart, you kinda accept
that there might be some apples that are already starting to rot.

In particular, coding is something that large-language models are very
good at, for at least two reasons:

- there's so much good code out there on the internet that the models
  were trained with.

- the nature of writing code is

There used to be a time where you could make a living being the human
that could translate the ticket into code.