blakewatson.com - I used Claude Code and GSD to build the accessibility tool I’ve always wanted
You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.
An app can be a home-cooked meal
I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.
The exhortation “learn to code!” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, a squirt of power. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.
But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way.
Related links
Training your replacement | Go Make Things
I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”
For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.
And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.
AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.
A programmer’s loss of identity - ratfactor
We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?
Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.
If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.
Deep Blue
My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:
…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.
That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.
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Automation
Take my job. Please.