The Digital Craftsman
Ian took a sip of the coffee as he walked over to his crafts table. It tasted perfect. Too perfect. Yet he hadn't slept much and needed the pickup.
There was a lot of work to do, so he would skip breakfast. He looked down at the work order displayed in digital ink. The task was full of nuance and required a steady hand. That was why he had been called.
He grabbed his tools: a keyboard and authorization key. The blueprints were laid out on the screen, describing the entire workflow in stunning detail. For anyone else, had they looked at it, it would've been gibberish. Yet he was the only one who still knew the ancient languages.
Decades of craft had given him a great deal of wisdom on how to handle these kinds of cases. Yet these things were never written down. This knowledge was never passed down.
Many of his colleagues were driven out entirely. They found other work which was more profitable. Slowly his profession was pushed away. Nobody was left.
Nobody except him.
Ian found the problem quickly. With a few minutes of typing, the solution was implemented. Before sharing, he took another glance at what he had written. A good craftsman ensures their work is of the highest quality.
Satisfied, he uploaded it to a remote server somewhere in the midwest. Immediately the server started processing his changes, packaging them into a new computer binary that would then be shipped across the world. If he did his job right, the machines would reload quietly in the background with his new code and nobody would ever know something changed.
Despite his code running on the devices of billions, they would never know who Ian was. But he knew who he was. He was the last programmer.
Software eats the world. That’s something we’ve seen happen many times in the last decade. AI may be the next iteration, allowing machines to take over all kinds of jobs including programming. After all, pixels are cheap to produce. It’s a question of labor costs.
AI isn’t good at writing code today. I’ve used it for personal projects. Sometimes it’ll answer a question I have, but often it fails at anything too complicated. That’s alright AI, I guess I’ll do the hard part…
But let’s say it actually gets good and builds up a new generation of software. What happens to all the libraries underpinning it? After all, our digital stacks are built on top of random projects and underappreciated programmers. I imagine programming to become a lost art.
Maybe one day we’ll have a Twentieth Century Faire to compete with the Renaissance Faires of today and you’ll be able to see real humans writing code. Haha what a strange time we used to live in.