The Obsolescence of Craft: When Competence Becomes Tragedy

The power went out on the first night of the storm. Ninety-mile-an-hour winds off the Pacific, trees cracking in the dark. My wife and I couldn't sleep. We lay there listening, trying to calculate which trees were close enough to reach the bedroom, whether the angle of fall would matter. Eventually we moved downstairs, as if an extra floor would save us. In the morning the world was felled branches and standing water. I started reading McCarthy. I'd put him off for years. He's one of those authors everyone insists you have to read, which is usually enough to send me wandering in the opposite direction. I prefer stumbling into authors rather than being assigned them. But my wife had gifted me All the Pretty Horses, and four days without power felt like the right time. I read it in a single sitting. Then The Crossing. Then The Road. What stayed with me most was John Grady Cole. He's sixteen when the novel opens, and he already possesses something rare: a preternatural understanding of horses. Not just how to ride them, but how to be with them. He can gentle a wild horse in ways that seem like magic but are really the accumulation of attention, patience, and countless hours of physical practice. He's a craftsman. And none of it saves him.

John Grady rides south into Mexico searching for a world that still values what he knows. He finds it, briefly. A hacienda with a herd worth his talents, a woman worth his love. But the world he's looking for is already gone. Maybe it never existed. The truck has already replaced the horse. The border has already hardened. His competence is irrelevant to the forces that will undo him: laws, violence, modernity, other people's choices. He does everything right, and it doesn't matter. McCarthy doesn't mock him for this. That's what makes the book devastating. John Grady isn't a fool or a luddite. He's right that his way of being in the world is beautiful. He's right that something is being lost. He still can't stop it from disappearing.

I've been thinking about John Grady a lot lately. I'm deep into a career built around craft. Not just writing code, but writing code that's beautiful—readable, elegant, delivering value without sacrificing clarity. A coworker I respected, when he left the company ten years ago, sent around his reflections. One line stayed with me: "Joe showed me that code can be beautiful." I don't know if I'd frame it that way myself. But I know the feeling he meant. And I'm watching that craft become obsolete in real time.

This week I asked Claude to refactor a module I'd been putting off. Tedious work, the kind that requires care but not insight. It took maybe thirty seconds. The code was clean. Not beautiful—but functional, readable, correct. The kind of work that used to be mine.

John Grady's gift wasn't just riding horses. It was a whole mode of attention. Patient, physical, present. The truck doesn't just replace the horse; it makes that way of being in the world unnecessary. You don't need to feel an engine the way you feel a horse beneath you. Is that what's happening? I guess I don't know. What I keep coming back to is McCarthy's refusal to offer John Grady an easy out. He doesn't get to be right and win. He doesn't get to reject modernity and find some pastoral sanctuary where his skills still matter. He just gets to be good at something beautiful while the world moves on without him.

There's a question buried in that: what does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it's dying? The skills might be depreciating, but the attention, the way of seeing systems, the pleasure of making something work, that's not separable from who I am. I didn't become an engineer because the market demanded it. I became one because my brain works this way, because I like the puzzle, because there's something satisfying about building things that function. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's denial. McCarthy doesn't tell us which. He just shows us John Grady Cole riding north at the end of the novel, crossed by the shadows of the clouds, heading somewhere we never see.

The power came back after four days. I walked outside. Branches everywhere, but the house still stood. We were alive.

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The Quiet Tragedy of Competence

There's a particular kind of grief that comes from being good at something that no longer matters. It's not the grief of failure—John Grady Cole succeeds at everything he attempts. It's not the grief of obsolescence—he's not outdated, he's simply incompatible with the world that's emerging. It's the grief of competence itself becoming tragic.

This is different from the anxiety of automation that dominated discussions five years ago. That anxiety was about replacement—machines doing our jobs faster, cheaper, better. But what McCarthy captures, and what I'm experiencing now, is subtler and more devastating: the realization that the very qualities that make us valuable—our attention, our patience, our deep understanding—become irrelevant not because they're inferior, but because the world no longer requires them.

When I watch Claude refactor code in thirty seconds that would have taken me hours, I'm not just seeing automation. I'm seeing the devaluation of a particular way of thinking. The code works. It's readable. It's correct. But it wasn't born from the same process of attention, of feeling my way through the problem space, of understanding not just what the code does but why it exists. That understanding—that mode of being with the code—was the craft.

The Craft of Attention

What made John Grady Cole exceptional wasn't his physical skill with horses. It was his attention. The way he could read an animal's mood, anticipate its movements, understand its fears and desires. This wasn't magic; it was the product of thousands of hours of patient observation, of being fully present with another being. The truck driver doesn't need this attention. He needs to know how to operate machinery, follow routes, maintain schedules. The skill is different, and arguably more valuable in a mechanized world.

Similarly, what I valued in my own work wasn't just the ability to write functional code. It was the ability to understand systems deeply, to anticipate edge cases, to write code that wasn't just correct but elegant—code that revealed its own logic, that taught the reader as they read it. This required a mode of attention that went beyond problem-solving. It required presence.

But presence is expensive. In a world that values speed and scale, presence becomes a luxury good. The market doesn't reward the time it takes to develop deep understanding. It rewards output. And output, as AI is demonstrating, can be decoupled from understanding.

The Refusal of Easy Answers

What makes McCarthy's treatment of this theme so powerful is his refusal to moralize. John Grady isn't wrong to value his way of being in the world. The novel doesn't suggest he should have become a truck driver instead. It simply shows us that his competence, however beautiful, cannot save him from the forces reshaping the world.

This is the part that's hardest to accept. We want stories where competence is rewarded, where doing things the right way leads to success. We want to believe that if we just work hard enough, develop our skills deeply enough, we'll be secure. But McCarthy suggests something more unsettling: that sometimes the world changes in ways that make our deepest competencies irrelevant, and there's no moral lesson in that, no redemption arc, just the quiet tragedy of a beautiful way of being that the world no longer needs.

The Question of Practice

The question that haunts me is whether there's still value in practicing a craft you suspect is dying. Is there dignity in continuing to develop skills that the market no longer rewards? Is there wisdom in maintaining a mode of attention that the world no longer requires?

The obvious answer is that there must be. These skills, this way of being, is part of who I am. Abandoning it would mean abandoning myself. But the less obvious, more troubling answer is that this might be denial. That continuing to practice a dying craft might be a form of self-deception, a refusal to acknowledge reality.

McCarthy doesn't resolve this tension. He simply shows us John Grady Cole riding north at the end of the novel, crossed by the shadows of the clouds, heading somewhere we never see. We don't know if he finds a place where his skills still matter. We don't know if he eventually accepts the world as it is. We just know that he continues, carrying his competence like a burden and a gift simultaneously.

The Persistence of Craft

Perhaps the answer lies in understanding that craft isn't just about the skills themselves, but about the way of seeing that develops through practicing those skills. Even if AI can write functional code, even if it can refactor modules in seconds, it doesn't see systems the way a human craftsman does. It doesn't develop the intuition that comes from years of feeling your way through problems, of understanding not just the mechanics but the meaning.

This way of seeing, this mode of attention, might be valuable even in a world that doesn't reward it directly. It might be the thing that allows us to understand what's being lost as the world changes, to recognize the beauty in what's disappearing, to mourn it properly.

John Grady Cole's tragedy isn't just that his skills became obsolete. It's that he was one of the few people who could truly see what was being lost as the world moved on. His competence gave him a perspective that others lacked. Perhaps that perspective, that ability to see and understand what's disappearing, is itself a form of value.

The Storm Passes

The power came back after four days. I walked outside. Branches everywhere, but the house still stood. We were alive. The storm had passed, but something had changed. The world looked different now, marked by what had happened. The fallen branches, the standing water, the way the light hit the wet pavement—all of it was evidence of the storm that had been.

Perhaps that's what practicing a dying craft gives us: the ability to see the evidence of what's passing, to understand the significance of what's changing, to carry forward not just the skills themselves but the awareness of what those skills meant. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it has to be.

Because the alternative—abandoning the craft entirely, accepting that the world has moved on without us—feels like a different kind of death. Not the death of skills, but the death of attention, of presence, of the deep way of being in the world that made those skills meaningful in the first place.

John Grady Cole didn't stop riding horses because trucks were faster. He kept riding because that was who he was. Perhaps the question isn't whether our craft will survive, but whether we can maintain our way of being in the world even as the world changes around us. Perhaps that's the real competence, and perhaps it's the only one that can't be automated away.