{"id":51287,"date":"2026-03-18T15:31:56","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T19:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51287"},"modified":"2026-03-26T11:12:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:12:37","slug":"grief-and-the-ai-split","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/18\/grief-and-the-ai-split\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief and the AI Split"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of code that would have been written by human programmers are now generated by AI models. That’s part of it, for sure. But what’s revolutionary — a topic I’ve been posting about twice already today — is that AI code generation tools are being used to create services and apps and libraries that simply would not have been written at all before. It may well be that the total number of lines of code that will be written by people today isn’t much different from the number of lines of code that were written by people a year ago. But there might be 10× more code generated by AI than is written by people today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Les Orchard<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation<\/em> behind the work was invisible because the process<\/em> was identical.<\/p>\n

Now there's a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built, or you can insist on hand-crafting it. And suddenly the reason you got into this in the first place becomes visible, because the two camps are making different choices at that fork.<\/p>\n

I wrote about this split before in terms of my college math and CS classes<\/a>: some of us loved proofs and theorems for their own sake, some of us only clicked with the material when we could apply it to something.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Here's what I notice about my grief: none of it is about missing the act of writing code. It's about the world around<\/em> the code changing. The ecosystem, the economy, the culture. I think that's a different kind of loss than what Randall and Lawson are describing. Theirs is about the craft itself. Mine is about the context and the reasons why we're doing any of this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Orchard’s fine essay examines a philosophical divide within the ranks of talented, considerate craftsperson developers. The divide that I’m talking about has been present ever since the demand for programmers exploded, but AI code generation tooling is turning it into an expansive gulf. The best programmers are more clearly the best than ever before. The worst programmers have gone from laying a few turds a day to spewing veritable mountains of hot steaming stinky shit, while beaming with pride at their increased productivity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

There are additional groups. Some good programmers don’t use AI for coding. They’re against it for philosophical reasons, or it doesn’t apply well to their current project, or they haven’t taken the time or built the skills to really make it work for them. There are also hobbyists and people who know some<\/em> programming, but are not really professional programmers, who are successfully using AI to help build tools for themselves.<\/p>\n\n

CM Harrington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Pssst… most software development was slop before AI. <\/p>\n

Sure, your<\/em> code was beautiful and artisanal and custom crafted to be beautiful, performant, and not at all created to be shipped in a fortnight between countless meetings with unclear goals and zero understanding of the bigger picture or user needs. <\/p>\n

But those other folks…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Sam Altman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Jonathan Blow<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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This is such a completely<\/em> different reality from where I live, at this point it’s just difficult to say anything meaningful about it at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n