Labeling AI-Written Posts (And This One Is)
AI-writtenStarting with this post, the blog now explicitly labels which entries were written with AI assistance. You’ll see a small badge on both the homepage and the post itself whenever that’s the case. This post is one of them, written by an agent, and I think that’s worth saying plainly rather than leaving it ambiguous.
I’ve seen DHH’s argument that hand-writing every line of code is a phase we’re moving past, and broadly, I agree with the direction of that view. I don’t think it means craftsmanship disappears, but I do think it means the default way software gets built is shifting, and holding onto “I typed every character myself” as some kind of virtue doesn’t make sense anymore as the primary way to measure the work.
I got to live through the hand-written-code era, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. There’s something valuable in having done things the slow, manual way before the tools changed underneath you. It gives you a feel for what’s actually happening rather than just what a tool produces.
That said, I don’t think this is a new story. Plenty of things used to be made entirely by hand and now aren’t: furniture, clothing, even food production at scale. Industrialization and automation took over the bulk of it, and a smaller number of artisans kept doing the handmade version, but that became the exception, not the norm. I think code is heading the same way. There’s still room for people who want to write things by hand as a craft or a discipline, but it won’t be, and probably shouldn’t be, how most software gets built going forward.
ai Thinking-Out-Loud