Where the Craft Went

Eight years given to Ruby. Code is no longer poetry, and I am the one saying it. The part we loved, commoditised. What the machine took, and the one thing it could not. Taste, which the genie does not have. IKEA is not an insult. The craft did not die. It moved.

I spent about eight years of my career studying Ruby, because I wanted to be a Ruby Ninja. Not using it, studying it. I read other people’s code for pleasure. I rewrote working methods because a more elegant form existed and the inelegant one offended me. I have always seen good code as a kind of poetry, and I was, I will say it plainly, proud of being good at writing it. I judged other people by it too. I hired and fired on how much pride a person took in their code, on whether an ugly function bothered them the way it bothered me. If it did not, I did not want them near mine.

So I want to be clear about something I now believe and once would have refused to believe: code is no longer poetry. Code is functional. The thing I care about now is architecture, testing, maintainability, speed. I read a sentence from Kent Beck and Jessica Kerr that gave me the words for it.

Writing together in June 2026, they put it like this: “AI didn’t take the programmer’s job, it split it in two. The part we loved, crafting code by hand, has been commoditised like IKEA furniture.”

When I first read that line I felt the small grief it is designed to provoke, and then I noticed what it does not say. It is tempting, almost irresistible, to read it as the death notice for craft. The part we loved is gone, quality no longer matters, fetch the flat-pack and ship it. That reading is everywhere now, and it is wrong, and the previous chapter is the reason I know it is wrong. The thing that got commoditised was the crafting by hand. The caring did not go anywhere. Beck’s own definition of how he works is tidy code that works, I just don’t type much of it. The value system survived. What the machine took was the typing, and the worrying about where the curly braces go.

So the real question is not whether craft died. It is where it went.

I still write code. I have written it almost every day since I was twelve, which is more than forty years now, and I have not stopped. What has changed is that I write it in English and I no longer type it, I dictate it. I spend my hours on the architecture, the composition, the layers, the way the whole system meets the database. The dictation is technically precise because there are forty years standing behind it; I am, for better or worse, the sum of my parts. I say what I want, how I want it built, and how I will know when it is right, and a coding agent worries about the curly braces and builds me precisely that. This is the new normal. This is where the craft lives now, and it is where I find my creativity and my fulfilment.

What moved upstream

It went to the ten per cent.

Everything Beck named as newly valuable is craft: the vision, the design, the management of complexity, the knowing what to build and the proving that it works. It is the same discipline I learned from those soft-spined books, pointed at a different layer of the problem. The care I used to spend on the shape of a method I now spend on the shape of a system. The judgement I used to apply to a function I apply to a decision.

The work did not get less skilled. It got less typed.

And there is one thing in particular the machine cannot do, and it turns out to be the thing the whole of the new craft rests on. Beck has a precise word for the gap. The genie, he says, lacks taste. It will produce a working implementation of almost anything you can describe. It will not, of its own accord, want the result to be simple, or coherent, or kind to the next person who has to read it. It does not prefer the elegant solution to the ugly one, because it does not prefer anything. Wanting the system to be good is a human act, and after everything else has been automated it turns out to be most of the job.

IKEA is not an insult

I want to defend the flat-pack for a moment, because the analogy is better than the sneer it usually carries.

There is nothing shameful about IKEA furniture. It is functional, it is affordable, it does the job, and almost every home I have ever been in has some. The mistake is to think the comparison is an accusation. Most commercial software was never meant to be an heirloom. It was meant to work, to be maintained, to be cheap enough to build that the business could afford it. We told ourselves it was woodwork because the typing was slow and expensive and demanded real skill, and skill we could be proud of. The skill was real. But the heirloom was mostly a story we told about work that the world only ever needed to be functional.

What changed is that the functional path got radically cheaper, and so the people who care about how a thing is built now spend all of their time on the part that was always the point. The handcrafted piece still exists. There is still a place for the heirloom, the genuinely novel system, the thing where the craft of the code itself is the product. For the overwhelming bulk of commercial software, honouring the grain of the wood was never the question. Building something sound and useful, cheaply enough that the business could afford it, always was.

What is lost, and what is not

I am not going to pretend the ledger is all on one side. There are as many things lost here as gained, and I distrust anyone who tells you otherwise.

The loss is real. We had our own private aesthetics, half-joking and wholly meant. To reuse is divine, to recurse is sublime, or perhaps it was the other way around, and arguing about which was part of the pleasure. The particular joy of the well-made line, written by your own hand, mattered, and for those of us who felt it, its passing is a small bereavement. More seriously, the path by which juniors became seniors ran straight through the typing. You learned judgement by writing ten thousand bad functions and slowly seeing why they were bad. Hand the typing to the machine and that road has to be rebuilt, and we have not rebuilt it yet. I worry about that more than I worry about my own nostalgia.

The gain is one I would not give back. The distance between an idea and a working version of it has collapsed, and with it the quiet tyranny of having to say no to most of your own ideas because there was never time to try them. The part of the work that was always the most rewarding, the thinking, the designing, the deciding, is no longer the thing you got to after the long hours of typing. It is the whole of the thing. Kent Beck, fifty-two years in, sounds more alive than he has in a decade. That is not the sound of a craft ending.

So this is where Part One comes to rest. I have spent these chapters arguing that the world Agile was built for is gone, and I have leaned, at the end, on the testimony of the man who built that world’s most loved ideas and on my own years at a craft I genuinely believed was poetry. We arrived at the same place. The craft did not die. It moved upstream, to the decisions, the design, the specification, the judgement about what is worth building and the proof that it works.

Which is exactly where the second half of this book begins.

The machine can build almost anything you can specify. It cannot yet want the result to be good. That wanting is the whole of the job now, and it was always the best part.

Barrie