Mitchell Hashimoto writes, in My AI Adoption Journey, of his process of adopting ‘AI’ agents in software development.

He describes himself as having been ‘a heavy AI skeptic’. My question, then, is, why did he force himself to try it?

He perhaps answers that when he says:

Adopting a tool feels like work, and I do not want to put in the effort, but I usually do in an effort to be a well-rounded person of my craft.

OK, I guess. But at the end he writes:

I’m a software craftsman that just wants to build stuff for the love of the game.

This feels relevant to what I was saying yesterday about tools like this feeling like cheating. If you’re only doing it for fun, as a hobby, then nobody’s judging you but yourself. But the craftsmanship, the writing it yourself: isn’t that the point?

If you did woodwork as a hobby, say, you could doubtless make a chair faster with an automated factory of some kind. But wouldn’t you lose the fact of being a craftsman, then? The very reason you took it up in the first place?