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I also compare staying in programming without even exploring AI to a photographer deciding they will only shoot film and never touch a digital camera.

Ice burn, on us & what we spend our time doing. We probably deserve it?

An interesting thing about that is usually industrialists win because only they have the capital to build the factories Thanks in part to open weights model, building an "AI coding factory" is affordable to individuals It's rare to see a disruptive technology like this so widely available

I can see how deterministic tools like compilers and table saws can be evaluated and adopted with confidence that they are a net positive. But blackboxed probabilistic tools like LLMs seem to defy rational evaluation and require "vibes" instead. So I'm not sure those are apt comparisons.

Or I might be misunderstanding what you mean with frameworkism?

I mean, the problem is you get dipshits like Elon in leadership who think more lines of code literally are better.

... unless you spend several months climbing the learning curve to figure out how to get useful results out of it, at which point it becomes a significant accelerant

It might be better to suggest that no one quit the lecture circuit just because someone taught a parrot to talk. 😉 #TheAICon

Mmm? "Programming" hasn't been a career for a good long while now. Even "software development" has mostly been eclipsed by "software engineering", thanks to "the cloud".

I tend to think it's more akin to the invention of the automobile. Sure you are still going to have horses and horse carriages and coachmen and stablehands, just a lot fewer of them.

You got cited here eev.ee/blog/2025/07...

Table saws aren’t replacing carpenters.

This is incorrect cause it implies LLM's are actually *good* at anything like how a table saw is good at things.

Your right about the pre-LLM tools, and it's only the urgency of the questions surrounding the software developer's relevance that has changed. It's inevitable that people with a loyalty to the technical arcana of passing era will be disappointed.

* a massive rise in AI usage will definitely not have negative consequences to jobs in software engineering, design, law, call centers, illustration, music production and other knowledge professions You *might* be right in both of these, but you don’t have *evidence* to support those statements.

I agree with your second take. Regarding AI coding assistants, the best code is actually free and open source, so they're not trained on legal IP, per se. Whether this is the Industrial Revolution or the agricultural revolution I don't know.

The assistance of AI to the programming process is effectively that you have a more expressive language in which to describe your objectives, and that language (English) gets “transpiled” into a machine language (a high-level programming language) in preparation for execution.

(I might only quibble here that carpentry as a skilled profession has, I’m guessing, 100% decreased as a percentage of the population since the invention of the power saw)

Overheard in a coffee shop this morning, android dev refused to use any AI. Like, good luck? Apply for all those jobs looking for programmers who are slower than everyone else, or maybe a job that does pull requests on post its?

People didn't quit carpentry when power tools were invented, they just continued to refine their craft. Today the stuff they build fetches a premium because people recognize it as superior to mass produced stuff built by machine.

I restored the Edwardian sash windows in my son's bedroom last year, and I did regret what power tools have done for the carpenter's skill. Efficiencies of some kind, I grant you. But the work was miraculous - you could not get a cigarette paper between some of the joins.

What about an AI powered table saw? 🤔😂

Will it be more of CNC impact on machining?

My son is finishing a CS degree AB’s it’s tough timing for him

Yeah, I would absolutely quit a career in carpentry if my boss fired all my co-workers and replaced them with a table saw that periodically leaps free and cuts people's fingers off without warning

can't agree more!

And a carpenter or a machinist who couldn't create their own tools was and isn't regarded as either.

High stakes r what a bunch of us play for, and right now its high stakes game is trash. And it's competing against decades of tool history that already exist and re-exist to chunk out entire deployable/functional applications for hot customization to exact business requirements in a button press.

I've taken to talking about LLM as chef's knives -- very effective but you might take a finger off Tho sheep dog as a metaphor is pretty apt... border collies are super bright, super energetic, and occasionally have a spontaneous mental breakdown and aggressively go for someone

Bonus points for cuteness.

I'd trust a sheepdog long before I trust a hallucinating LLM at this point. At least a sheepdog has limits in how crazy it can get.

Love this observation: that table saw analogy really is an ink blot test for people's opinions of LLMs bsky.app/profile/yayp...

I didn't realise sheep dogs were so good at carpentry 🐶 🪚. I wonder trade skills my reindeer herding dog has been keeping from me.

The alignment problem for sheep dogs is pretty solved though (assuming you have a flock of sheep)

It's not good at everything, but it's also not bad everything.

Agree. Are they perfect? No. Neither am I. Are they useful? For sure! Am I better with one in my tool kit? Absolutely. Are they overhyped? Hell yeah! Sadly, so is everything new in tech. I just don’t get the hate. Lean in. Learn how to use them. Get better. Lather rinse repeat. #kthxbye

I spent more than an hour strategizing and designing with Claude today. It was great and reminded me of having a couple of young programmers and a whiteboard. I imagined asking them how long to implement. Claude did it in ten minutes. I spent another half hour refining. Orders of magnitude for sure.

but can you build things faster *without compromising on robustness, performance, or quality*?

I just spent a few nights writing up my approach to trying to introduce some form of determinism to LLM-assisted coding workflows. Not a one size fits all of course. Would be interested in your thoughts. mariozechner.at/posts/2025-0...

Honestly, 'cheap homemade CNC machine' fits the bill quite well, but the number of people who might get that reference is vanishingly small. I suspect sheepdogs are much more reliable than cheap homemade CNC machines, which are, in turn, much more reliable than getting an LMM do do all your coding.

Quitting carpentry because of the invention of the sheepdog? I guess it's less ominous than your sheepdog quitting because of the invention of the table saw.

Especially if the table saw couldn't cut straight and occasionally set the wood on fire.

Never better described! Perfect analogy 🙂

Yeah if you're a programmer I can't see why you would let AI take over. It's almost like how dare they...

The table saw is deterministic though

Not so much a table saw, as a wood chipper

At a code level: strongly agree At a societal level: given how the range of employers right now goes from everyday grifter to nation-state-level robber baron, quitting programming may be the most ethical alternative most laborers have.

The rejection lead to a beautiful arts movement. I think because it was treated as a creative constraint, rather than a reactionary impulse? Building vs quitting.

I honestly feel bad for everyone impacted (my job as a dev is also in the crosshairs), but their skills aren't just vanishing, and their experience is gilded. Creativity is still the commodity. This just changes how we create, and we all just have to adapt and evolve as the new landscape is forged.

One of my great pleasure is opening Claude on a repo of something I did ages years ago and not going through. The stress of figuring out myself.

Unless you quit because you are afraid of loosing fingers.

Please share more about this point of view or cover it in your next blog. I’ve been thinking that now is the best time ever to get into programming because there’s so much potential to create, but again I’d be interested to hear what’s motivating your POV as I’m still really new to this space.

With AI productivity improvements all medium to large companies should be developing software in house to support their business needs, something that pre-AI would likely have been too expensive to do.

It's gonna be fun when everyone only knows how to talk to their agent, but knows nothing useful at all about actually writing code. I guess it'll keep us security nerds employed, so there's that

Actually, yes

Table saws cut off a lot of fingers, and technology to help stop that ended up involved in a lot of very heated litigation en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop

Pretty sure feeding and transporting a guy to saw boards by hand costs more to the environment than the electricity consumed by a table saw

But but... I thought the table saw was gonna do all the wood sourcing, the design, the planing/surfacing, the joining, assembly, the finishing and sealing. So remind me why we even needed carpenters any more?

Cameras were terrible for realist painters but were great for abstractionists and impressionists whose work became more rarified by volume!

Table saws are useful

So it even may make sense to not dive too deep in until there is a good reason or motivation. But if there is such motivation, it can be extremely rewarding.

The agentic coding stuff Armin is talking about is really at the cutting edge right now, it hardly existed six months ago Not surprising if it takes people quite a bit of work to catch up to that!

Table saws actually work tho

Down by ~2/3rds since 1900. It’s good though. The really skilled programmers will be in high demand. The ones who take 2 weeks to figure out why the program isn’t working will do something else. 20 years from now the average K-12 class will be 10 kids (or Trump jr will be ruling over N Korea east).

"Oh I just have too much spare time and I always get everything done" said no developer ever.

This is truly psycho shit, I love it. lets have a swing of it go on

* if the table saw could convrese with you and cut a table by itself as good as a junior carpenter.

The Peter principle bites extra hard in nerdy professions.

Process and accountability issue imo

It's more the loss of control over the design, that's the problem tbh.

I think the situation is somewhere between knitting machines (agents like Claude Code) and table saws (more like autocomplete/chatbots). But it is golden time to become a programmer. These tools offer endless tutoring/help. They decipher errors to plain text. Discuss high level approaches. Etc.

Yeah, I listened to that podcast the other day where Sam Altman was talking about 'agentic power tools' where the agentic saw just kind of sits there, doesn't read your emails or connect to your bank account and waits for its human orders. Seems like a lot of folks here heard his other podcasts...

No ones trying to replace coders in the way you're thinking. It's via efficiency of existing devs, not replacing devs. Same way the plow "replaced" farmers.

I think the cognitive decline thing is overblown, personally If you let LLMs think for you then sure, you won't learn as much - but you can also chose to use LLMs in a way that actively challenges you to learn more and take on more ambitious projects

That kind of thing is why I like the power tools analogy: you need to learn a whole bunch of things to stay safe from those kinds of behaviors