Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Summary

March 21, 2026 Why craft-lovers are losing their craft Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was invisible: Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. The tools didn't create a division; they simply revealed an existing one. Orchard himself belongs to the first camp. He learned BASIC at age seven not because BASIC was beautiful but because he wanted things to happen on screen. For him, LLM coding assistants are just another rung on the same ladder he's always been climbing. The puzzle didn't disappear; it moved to a higher level of abstraction. He grieves, but what he grieves is the ecosystem around the work, not the work itself. Nolan Lawson grieves differently: We'll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We'll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We'll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. His post reads like an elegy, and the grief in it is real. What he's mourning is the act itself. Two developers, both thoughtful, both honest, looking at the same moment and feeling different things. That asymmetry is worth taking seriously, because it points to something the “just adapt” conversation keeps missing. Alienated from the act Marx identified four dimensions of alienated labor: separation from the product of one's work, from the act of working itself, from other people, and from one's own human capacities. In the context of LLM coding assistants, the second of these is doing most of the work. What Marx meant by separation from the act is something like this. Humans, unlike other animals, can imagine what they want to make before they make it and then ...