The Programmer Identity Crisis

When I became a software engineer about two decades ago, I held a similar world view as the OP: programming is a craft, I'm an artist, a creator, a hacker.

With years, as I matured, and the industry matured, I came to realize that corporate programming is assembly line work but with a much bigger paycheck. You can dance around it as much as you want, but in the end, if you truly zoom out, you will realize that it's no different from an assembly line. There are managers to oversee your work and your time allocations; there is a belief that more people = more output; and everyone past your manager's manager seem to think that what you do is trivial and can be easily replaced by robots. So a software engineer who calls himself an artist is basically that same as a woodworker who works for a big furniture company, and yet insists on calling himself an artist, and referring to their work as craft, while in reality they assemble someone's else vision and product, by using industry standard tools.

And at first, I tried to resist. I held strong opinions as the OP. How come they came for MY CRAFT?! But then I realized that there is no craft. Sure, a handful of people work on really cool things. But if you look around, most companies are just plain dumb REST services with a new an outfit slapped on them. There is no craft. The craft has been distilled and filtered into 3-4 popular frameworks that dictate how things should be written, and chances are if I take an engineer and drop them in another company using the same framework, they won't even notice. Craft is when you build something new and unique, not when you deploy NextJS to Vercel with shadcn/ui and look like the other 99% of new-age SaaS offerings.

So I gave up. And I mainly use AI at my $DAY_JOB. Because why not? It was mundane work before (same REST endpoints, but with different names; copying and pasting around common code blocks), and now I don't suffer that much anymore. Instead of navigating the slop that my coworkers wrote before AI, I just review what AI wrote, in small pieces, and make sure it works as expected. Clean code? Hexagonal architecture? Separation of concerns? Give me a break. These are tools for "architects" and "tech leads" to earn a pat on their shoulder and stroke their ego, so they can move to a different company, collecting a bigger paycheck, while I get stuck with their overengineered solutions.

If I want to craft, I write code in my free time when I'm not limited by corner-cutting philosophy, abusive deadlines, and (some) incompetent coworkers each with their ego spanning to the moon as if instead of building a REST service for 7 users, they are building a world transforming and life-saving device for billions (powered by web3/blockchain/AI of course).

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While I don't disagree that there's no craft most of the time, it's interesting to note that the anti-analogy with art and artists doesn't really work (or works in an unexpected way).

I'm visiting a lot of museums and exhibitions for a number of years now, without having any kind of art education, etc. After some time you start seeing patterns and understand more even if you still haven't read your art history. What strikes me time and time again, is that there's a huge amount of repetition even in great artists' work. It's definitely not an assembly line, but they do the same thing over and over again for years and years. That was true centuries ago and that's true today.