AI is a hot topic among developers these days. And I mean hot. There’s clearly a divide amongst us. I see it most sharply between the devs I know at work and the devs I know in open source. Work devs are all in on this stuff. My open source friends, not so much.
It would be too easy for me to draw the conclusion that the AI divide among my friends and colleagues is a divide between those who just want to ship software and those who see some intrinsic value in code. There’s been plent of writing lately trying to draw similar conclusions. The best starting point for this is Les Orchard’s Grief and the AI Split.
Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
It’s a really great, thoughtful post. I think there’s some truth to it, maybe even a lot of truth. The reason I can’t so easily accept this explanation is because it’s not so neat and clean for me. I love craft, and I also love to ship software. I’m a weird mix of pragamatism and ideology. I’m definitely the kind of developer who has feelings about AI, but I’m not sure what they are. Maybe Les is right, and I’m just at war with myself. I'm definitely going to keep writing, keeping working it out for myself, until I figure out what I really think.