The Craftsmanship Crisis: How AI-Generated Code Threatens Software's Soul

The proliferation of AI-generated content—dubbed 'slop'—has infected audio, video, and text with low-effort, algorithmically optimized garbage. Now, this phenomenon is spreading to software development. Alex Wennerberg's analysis connects Jacques Ellul's concept of 'technique'—the reduction of creative work to efficient, metric-driven outputs—to modern software engineering's crisis of craftsmanship.

Just as Spotify's playlist algorithms spawned a wave of generic muzak by prioritizing engagement metrics over musical artistry, Big Tech's obsession with scale has degraded software quality. Wennerberg observes that engineers at major tech companies often function as 'plumbers,' connecting systems without regard for elegant design or maintainability. This environment breeds what Jonathan Blow termed the 'collapse of software civilization': bloated, poorly documented systems created by hyper-specialized engineers whose broader skills atrophy.

AI thrives in this landscape. For rote coding tasks—writing unit tests or stitching APIs—tools like ChatGPT deliver passable results. But Wennerberg's experiments reveal severe limitations: AI hallucinates solutions, produces 'braindead' verbose code, and fails spectacularly when tackling unconventional problems like Forth programming. Its UI designs exhibit telltale flaws: inconsistent spacing, over-labeled elements, and aesthetic flatness.

Crucially, AI cannot address software's core crisis: our collective failure to build well-crafted systems at scale. Wennerberg draws inspiration from the 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement, where John Ruskin and William Morris championed human artistry against industrial mass production. Similarly, he advocates exploring forgotten computing paradigms beyond the dominant C/Unix and JavaScript stack, pointing to resources like the Permacomputing Wiki for alternative approaches.

Paradoxically, AI's rise may catalyze a craftsmanship renaissance. As algorithmically generated code floods mainstream development, thoughtfully engineered software becomes both scarcer and more valuable. Wennerberg envisions a future where engineers disillusioned with Big Tech's 'enshittification' rediscover human-scale creation—building systems with intentionality, beauty, and durability that machines cannot replicate. This isn't Luddism; it's a recalibration. For problems demanding genuine ingenuity, human minds remain irreplaceable. The path forward lies not in rejecting AI, but in reserving it for tasks where 'good enough' suffices, while fiercely protecting space for software crafted with purpose.