The Craft of Software Development Endures in the Age of AI

Is the craft dead? February 08, 2026

Posted in Musings

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The Japanese are really good at woodworking. And I love watching the Yankee workshop, my dad makes Native American bows and arrows completely from scratch in his workshop with trees that he finds. This is all different from the stuff you get at IKEA, but I've been coding now for money for 35 years and systems are still complicated, computers still do dumb stuff, humans still do dumb stuff, this is just like the move from assembler to C, like the introduction of syntax highlighting, the introduction of intellisense, and the copy paste directly into production shift when stack overflow happened.

There is value in good taste, there is value in craftsmanship, and there is value in human judgment. The furniture might be differently designed, but we're still interior designers and putting together a cohesive system is non-trivial. Don't let them gaslight you with one shot Minecraft clones and one shot C compilers. Software is still hard, it's just that you're no longer I/O bound with the speed of your fingertips.

I think that there will be lots of work for us cleaning up after the slop, but if you know what you're doing AI augmented development is going to get you some amazing results and I am enjoying learning a ton during this momentous era shift - but the craft still exists.

ABOUT SCOTT

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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