The Arts and Crafts movement flourished in the late 1800s as a reaction to industrialization, but it’s often misread as anti-technology. It wasn’t. Instead, if someone hand-carves a chair, it should be because the carving itself means something to them. Not to spite the machine. Because the act carries value.
As I thought about this a few days, back, I contrasted that with my mom. She was born during the Great Depression. That era shaped people in a particular way: industrious, cheerful about hard work, genuinely finding satisfaction in making things. Not as philosophy. As necessity. She carried that her whole life.
Both of these are sitting with me right now as I think about software engineering.
For most of my career, I handcrafted every line of code because I had to. That constraint forced real discipline: data structures, optimization, control flow. It also meant my time and energy were spent on boilerplate, null checks, and plumbing that had nothing to do with the actual problem.
I don’t love writing software. I love making software.
The best woodworkers didn’t stop being craftspeople when power tools arrived. They redirected toward design, judgment, knowing when the hand tool was still the right choice. The craft migrated toward what mattered.
That’s the moment we’re in.
When an LLM can produce code as clean as what I’d write, the question stops being “how do I type this?” It becomes: what deserves my full human attention? Requirements mapping. Product alignment. Architectural intent. Figuring out what problem we are actually solving.
My mom’s generation had it right for their constraints. When money is scarce, you make things yourself. You find meaning and dignity in the doing because you have no other choice. That work ethic wasn’t imposed. It grew from necessity and became something genuine.
When the constraint shifts—when the scarce resource is no longer your hands but your judgment and attention—the rational response is to move with it.
Not because the toil disappears. Work is still work.
But because now you get to choose where the craft lives.