Nobody Wants Artisanal Code Anymore

Bluestein 22 points 27 comments August 26, 2026
gordonbeeming.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (13 comments)

Madmallard

First it was "The End of Programming" two hours ago. Now this one. Lol

tagalog

I bounced at the first load-bearing use of load-bearing.

tom_

Apparently nobody wants artisanal writing either!

ActionHank

This is so stupid. Can an accountant make a CRM in a weekend? Sure. Will it be there next week? Maybe, probably not. Building software was never, not even once, about writing code. That’s easy, literally anyone can do it. It’s about building something that lasts beyond needing to be completely refactored.

boesboes

And I don't want your blog-slop vomit

dofm

This is exhausting and would have been a lot easier to read in the more, how to put it, natural writing style the author had until early 2025. What changed, I wonder? ;-/

lensecat

If you're gonna slop-write your blog post at least put in the same effort you urge people to make when writing code...

Citizen_Lame

Pot, kettle, something. Karma bot pointing to AI written article complaining about lack of artisanal code.

apt-apt-apt-apt

Huge bloated article that unclearly expresses a simple thought. It's like the author prompted, "write me a big article on what is and isn't a commodity with AI, and make it confusing"

flossly

We need down-vote buttons for slop like this on HN. How can this reach the frontpage? Since you are reading, here a story of mine. Both me and a friend build a SaaS product using ClaudeCode. We both have 15+ year experience in software (he more in dotNET me more in FLOSS). He just accepted everything it came up with (pretty much vibe). I was suuuuuuper careful about what I accepted and spend the first weeks programming a lot myself. His stack for JS was HUUUGE. Several different technologies were used. Mine JS stack was: only use Alpine.js (and avoid JS as much as possible). His backend stack was equally huge: lots of native/binary OS dependencies bundled in Docker. Mine was 13MB of libs on top of the JVM. Being one year in I run 3500 tests in 20secs. App boots under 3secs. He considers rewriting it. The art(isanal) is still important. Sure it's different now. But MY GOD what a difference a bit of oversight/leadership/tech-vision can make.

bbg2401

I'm glad frontend design skills have moved us away from the generic, inoffensive font families of yesteryear towards the likes of Space Grotesk and a smattering of IBM Plex Mono in places ill-suited to monospace families.

Gualdrapo

AI slop aside, lately I've been thinking about that term, it seems to fit what I do - artisanal coding. Just saw a comment here saying that it never mattered but at least for frontend it happens there are cases you can still be able to tell where it was made by an LLM agent or it was made by a human. Take for example this thing I found on HN the other day: https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93 There are lots of magic numbers in the CSS, extra and redundant elements in the HTML that shouldn't be needed if the author was aware of radial gradients, and unoptimized and redundant SVG elements that very well could have been CSS shapes or a single SVG symbol that can be easily cloned and rotated. I just wish there are still people (and employers!) that actually care for this kind of stuff.

VCFundedGenYer

This is objectively false. I write code by hand all the time, and just did yesterday. This is either AI slop or AI sycophantism.

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