--- title: Dev Twitter misses the craft, and the discourse is kind... description: A meta-commentary on a shift in developer content: prominent voices like Cory House, Vicki Boykis, and Kent C. Dodds are lamenting (or defending) the move away... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/dev-twitter-misses-the-craft-and-the-discourse-is-kind-of-proving-the-point-x8mcdmszg twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Dev Twitter misses the craft, and the discourse is kind of proving the point | daily.dev og:description: A meta-commentary on a shift in developer content: prominent voices like Cory House, Vicki Boykis, and Kent C. Dodds are lamenting (or defending) the move away... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/dev-twitter-misses-the-craft-and-the-discourse-is-kind-of-proving-the-point-x8mcdmszg og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/X8MCDmSzg.png og:image:alt: Dev Twitter misses the craft, and the discourse is kind of proving the point og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Dev Twitter misses the craft, and the discourse is kind of proving the point **[Trends](https://daily.dev/sources/trends)** · 2 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A meta-commentary on a shift in developer content: prominent voices like Cory House, Vicki Boykis, and Kent C. Dodds are lamenting (or defending) the move away from deep technical craft content toward AI tooling and prompting guides. Boykis frames it starkly — old posts required deep system knowledge to hunt down O(n²) hot paths; new posts teach you which magic word to type into Claude. Dodds defends the pivot on economic grounds: if your audience has moved to AI tooling, making React accessibility videos is a bad use of time. The real tension is that craft content didn't disappear because craft stopped mattering — it disappeared because it's harder to make go viral. The audience got wider and shallower simultaneously, and whether that's progress depends on which side of the door you're standing on. ## Content Something is fracturing in how developers talk about their work, and the posts flying around this week make it hard to ignore. The setup: AI tools have gotten good enough that a developer can ship 20,000 lines of production Kotlin in a few days without typing a single character. That's real. The argument is about what it costs. On one side, Santiago Valdarrama (@svpino) is done with the hand-wringing: "Do you understand you are still typing gibberish like a caveman while the rest of us are making money by talking to a magic box?" Kent C. Dodds has stopped making React tutorials because, in his words, building accessible forms is "boring and useless to talk about now." The position is basically: the tools changed, adapt or get left behind. On the other side, the concern isn't nostalgia — it's structural. A paper circulating this week frames it as a "Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons": every firm benefits from a profession-wide pool of deep expertise, but each firm has an incentive to cut the junior roles that regenerate it. The labor data is uncomfortable: workers aged 22-25 in highly AI-exposed roles saw a 16% relative employment decline from late 2022 to mid-2025, while the 35-49 cohort grew by over 8%. The pipeline is narrowing. The Primeagen is buying books about 1990s game engines for fun. Vicki Boykis notes that getting good at "just" writing code is not easy, and the blog posts have shifted from "how I cut latency by 200ms across hundreds of machines" to "here's how to get the most out of /ultrathink in Claude." Armin Ronacher (mitsuhiko) is reading every line of his own projects and zero lines of what he calls "pure slop projects." The developer who failed a no-AI interview and tweeted "I'm really cooked without autocomplete" is probably the most honest data point in this whole conversation. Awesomekling's take cuts through the noise: the differentiator won't be taste, it'll be sustained attention. Most AI-assisted software will follow an "easy come, easy go" pattern and get abandoned. That might be right. But sustained attention is also exactly what you build by struggling through problems — the same friction that's being optimized away. The uncomfortable middle: both sides are correct about different things, and neither wants to admit it. ## Questions this post answers ### Why are some senior TypeScript developers saying types vs interfaces no longer matter? The argument is that AI tooling is collapsing the distance between idea and working software, making low-level craft debates feel like optimizing the wrong layer. Matt Pocock, who built a career teaching TypeScript internals, described himself as 'less excited about types vs interfaces than I used to be,' invoking the deckchairs-on-the-Titanic metaphor to suggest the debate is beside the point given how AI is reshaping development. _Developers navigating this shift in TypeScript priorities track where the community is landing on daily.dev._ ### What is the argument that developer friction was actually valuable for building judgment? Friction in software development wasn't just inefficiency — it was the mechanism by which developers built taste and judgment. Shipping bad work, living with failures, and iterating developed a fast, wordless sense of what's right. Removing that friction for new developers risks producing fluent AI-prompt generators who never built the instincts needed to recognize when AI output is subtly broken. Taste is economically invisible: it prevents disasters that leave no trace. _Engineers thinking through how to develop judgment in AI-assisted teams find the ongoing debate on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 4 discussions and 338 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-08-10). **TL;DR:** No external discussion data was provided, so no community signal can be extracted from comments on this post. "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers: The community is deeply divided: many agree that coding itself is genuinely hard and the 'code was never the hard part' framing is dismissive, but a significant faction argues that the real difficulty lies in understanding requirements, system design, and correctness — not the act of typing code — and that this distinction matters more than ever with AI tools. Taste Is All That's Left: The community is deeply divided — many commenters dismiss the post itself as AI-generated slop (ironic given its subject), while a minority find the core argument about taste and craft genuinely resonant; the debate over the article's authorship largely overshadows engagement with its ideas. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 40% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - Coding encompasses far more than typing syntax — correctness, maintainability over time, and architectural soundness are all genuinely difficult. - Several commenters found the core argument — that friction was the curriculum for developing taste — genuinely resonant and worth sitting with. - The author's transparency in publishing the exchange and engaging civilly with his critic was widely appreciated. - High programmer salaries reflect real scarcity of people who can do the full job, including navigating ambiguous requirements and building reliable systems. - The fashion/haute-couture analogy sparked an interesting thread about boutique software as a plausible future, where decades of manual experience defines the high end. **The pushback** - Many commenters argue that 'writing code' (as distinct from engineering) genuinely is the easy part, and that understanding what to build and why is the harder challenge. - A significant portion of commenters believe the post was written or heavily shaped by an LLM, calling it ironic that an essay about taste reads like 'slop.' - The Industrial Revolution analogy is contested: critics argue history rarely repeats neatly, and that being a 'fellow traveler' to big change offers no safety guarantees. - Programmer salaries were partly inflated by VC-era demand and ZIRP, not purely by the intrinsic difficulty of coding. - The premise 'the output is good enough' does enormous unexamined work — critics argue AI output frequently isn't good enough, and granting that assumption quietly buries the stronger objection. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): A lively, multi-threaded debate with no consensus — some defend coding as genuinely hard, others insist the difficulty was always in requirements and correctness rather than syntax, and a few argue AI has already commoditized most of the work. - lobsters (mixed): No comments were present, so no community signal is available beyond the submission itself. **Hottest debate:** "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers: Whether 'writing code' and 'writing correct code' are meaningfully separable — and therefore whether the 'code was never the hard part' claim is insightful or a semantic sleight of hand. **Open questions** - Will AI tools actually free engineers to tackle harder technical problems, or will business incentives just use them to cut headcount? - If taste is economically invisible and leaves no dashboard credit, how does a developer or team actually justify or protect it in a market that rewards speed? - What concrete options exist for developers who want to resist or organize, beyond individual career adjustment? - How much of the historically high programmer salary was due to genuine skill scarcity versus VC-era demand inflation? - Does removing the friction of manual coding genuinely prevent new developers from building taste, or does taste simply migrate to a new kind of friction (prompting, reviewing, refactoring AI output)? **Highlights** > Precisely -- worker protections, child-labor laws, days off, social security, etc. weren't magically bestowed onto employees via gentlemanly democratic processes, but were literally written in the blood of workers who physically resisted and revolted. There are probably more workers-rights-focused books on the topic, but I recently read [The Ages of Discord](https://www.amazon.com/Ages-Discord-Peter-Turchin/dp/0996139540) and even the cursory treatment of the (often very violent) workers' struggles was eye-opening. If there had been no Luddites (and their successors of all political stripes) and the quietists had dominated intellectually, then perhaps today we'd all be living a huge labor camp a-la North Korea? On the other hand, this definitely is a huge collective action problem, of the kind modern civilization isn't looking too good at solving. > — [pzel on lobsters · 7 points, 2 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/vowt4d/i_got_email_about_resistance#c_u6bcwr) > As I read this, I was reminded of two quotes. The first is about [the taste gap from Ira Glass](https://vimeo.com/85040589): > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. The second is from [The Ze Frank Show](https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-083): > For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family. > > The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations — lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about "ugly." > > Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you. > > As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers. I'm not sure what I make of all this. > — [spc476 on lobsters · 4 points, 2 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/4qfkrz/taste_is_all_s_left#c_b1a4to) > After reading this reply, I read the addendum, and then read a few of your other posts. I will say that many others very much do _not_ sound like slop; when I compare them using the various AI detectors [1], posts from early 2025 say 10% or 0% and newer ones, including this one, say 100% AI or "AI paraphrased." That shift seems to have taken place, to my eye and to those of the detectors, between "The Federation Fallacy" (June 26, 2025) and "The Tradeoff Trap" (August 10, 2025). I'm really torn: on the one hand, you seem very genuine, and I'd really like to believe that there were no LLMs involved. On the other hand, there are just so _many_ of these tells present, from jarringly different sentences composed of three or four words in the form " [article] " to the little thinking-outside-of-thinking phrases like "I want to be careful here", "Here is the uncomfortable mechanism", and "[H]ere is the defense, such as it is" that emerge from the mechanism of LLMs' relentless forward march of token completion, that it's hard for me to believe. If it's really true that the machines write like you, I'm sorry. That's awful. With that said, I do think that writing well these days means taking the time to make clear, through both careful editing and clear sentence construction, that what we put out doesn't sound like the machine -- and I wonder what happened about a year ago that made you stop doing that. 1: To me, the comparison is much more interesting than the raw number. I understand that simply reporting "GPTZero says AI" is mostly meaningless. > — [mtset on lobsters · 2 points](https://lobste.rs/s/4qfkrz/taste_is_all_s_left#c_5zs9vk) > What would have been a shitty thing to do was to just publicly indict him online. There's a lot of that going round and it's not a good way of convincing anyone of anything. It's entirely performative and makes people reflexively dig in their heels and entrench their positions. Like if you do anything publicly online someone you've never met or talked to will eventually come out of nowhere and make a blog post or forum post or whatever just railing on you with accusations, often some mentally ill person convinced you're part of some conspiracy. That genuinely sucks. Emailing someone and saying "hey I think you're wrong, have you considered this" is not that, and a much better thing to do. In this case they opted to make it a public debate, and if that's mutually agreeable that is fine. I think it was civil and well played by both parties. > — [marginalia on lobsters · 2 points](https://lobste.rs/s/vowt4d/i_got_email_about_resistance#c_odxae2) > > Well, we know what many of them did do. They shot factory-owners, smashed machines, burned down the factories I know Sean had done the reading to know this is a misrepresentation. It's not a lie, but it's close in my view. "factory-owners" as a plural is contentious given that Horsfall is the only confirmed case, although there were other attempts. Most human on human violence was committed by the state, just in case anyone was reading this thinking that the Luddites were an unusually violent movement. I understand that this isn't the point he's trying to make however, this is : > But if I were a textiles worker in 1810s England, I would not be telling my friends and loved ones “it’s time to fight, let’s go smash up the factories for Ned Ludd!“ I struggle to understand this for a few reasons. The combination acts were overwhelmingly unjust and unfairly applied. Reading generously, perhaps I can infer there is a "... but I would be encouraging support of the reformist movements of Gravener Henson!" These failed, but there must be some obligation in the direction of justice, surely? One can broadcast a need for care whilst advocating for either incrementalist or radical reform. Even the machine-breaking arm of the Luddites were careful, and tried their darndest to keep each other safe, to the point the government had to outlaw oath-taking, because the luddites protected each other too well. Also, and not to put too fine a point on it, Sean is not in that situation, being a senior engineer in US big tech, he is the most privileged class inside a class of already privileged worker. He is so far at the top of the working class he might not even define himself as such. He very well might be saying these things if he were the average textile worker in 1810, where he would not have experienced anything like the same sort of class mobility, and have less to lose. This did nettle me a bit, but I still respect Sean for making this response. Don't let the existence of this criticism take away from that. There is a valid point to be made about the obligation to protect younger and more vulnerable colleagues. You can use your platform, your time, your bank account to support them materially with more than just advice. If you are in the UK as I am, there is a union for tech workers. Whilst it is by no means perfect, it does exist. You can find it here : https://utaw.tech/ > — [elliotmorris on lobsters · 1 points](https://lobste.rs/s/vowt4d/i_got_email_about_resistance#c_3rthb0) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222189) · 209 points · 181 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199346) · 128 points · 106 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/vowt4d/i_got_email_about_resistance) · 41 points · 22 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234470) · 13 points · 16 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/4qfkrz/taste_is_all_s_left) · 16 points · 12 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/iixlsm/code_was_never_hard_part_is_insult_all) · 1 points · 1 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228736) · 5 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Is the craft dead?](https://daily.dev/posts/is-the-craft-dead--q7u0m8yfu) · Scott Hanselman · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Death of the Software Craftsman](https://daily.dev/posts/the-death-of-the-software-craftsman-ae0ea4mxj) · RUBYLAND · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI code and software craft](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-code-and-software-craft-dabjwqv7n) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [We mourn our craft](https://daily.dev/posts/we-mourn-our-craft-rhdtuknzs) · Read the Tea Leaves · 57 upvotes · 21 comments - [I am not sure software engineering was ever what we thought it was – shipping bytes](https://daily.dev/posts/i-am-not-sure-software-engineering-was-ever-what-we-thought-it-was-shipping-bytes-xioqxzmja) · shipping bytes · 22 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#react](https://daily.dev/tags/react), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#content-creation](https://daily.dev/tags/content-creation) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/dev-twitter-misses-the-craft-and-the-discourse-is-kind-of-proving-the-point-x8mcdmszg) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Dev Twitter misses the craft, and the discourse is kind of proving the point","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/dev-twitter-misses-the-craft-and-the-discourse-is-kind-of-proving-the-point-x8mcdmszg","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/dev-twitter-misses-the-craft-and-the-discourse-is-kind-of-proving-the-point-x8mcdmszg"},"datePublished":"2026-08-03T14:28:40.655Z","dateModified":"2026-08-10T15:56:51.628Z","description":"A meta-commentary on a shift in developer content: prominent voices like Cory House, Vicki Boykis, and Kent C. 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Matt Pocock, who built a career teaching TypeScript internals, described himself as 'less excited about types vs interfaces than I used to be,' invoking the deckchairs-on-the-Titanic metaphor to suggest the debate is beside the point given how AI is reshaping development. Developers navigating this shift in TypeScript priorities track where the community is landing on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What is the argument that developer friction was actually valuable for building judgment?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Friction in software development wasn't just inefficiency — it was the mechanism by which developers built taste and judgment. Shipping bad work, living with failures, and iterating developed a fast, wordless sense of what's right. Removing that friction for new developers risks producing fluent AI-prompt generators who never built the instincts needed to recognize when AI output is subtly broken. Taste is economically invisible: it prevents disasters that leave no trace. Engineers thinking through how to develop judgment in AI-assisted teams find the ongoing debate on daily.dev."}}]} ```