I think there’s an important difference between art, craft, and (for a lack of a better term) “getting stuff done”.

Art, to me, is fundamentally about creative expression that is not necessarily driven by a practical purpose (although good art conveys ideas, emotions or values). A recent example of this might by Lyra Rebane’s creative abuse of QR codes.

Craft is about cleverly and efficiently solving problems, which can involve bits of art by solving the problems in creative or aesthetically pleasing ways but the fundamental motivation and aim feels different.

I’m not convinced that art is a necessary (or common) part of day-to-day software work and I don’t feel like software artists are particularly impacted by AI, unlike craft, where the impact of AI feels significant.

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This is a very insightful observation, thanks. On a related note, effect systems seem to unify all three of these (function coloring, state parameters and error propagation) but I was never able to articulate why should they be related until reading your comment.

unless you bite the bullet and unwrap it

Or for async, block the current thread on the future.

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My general experience is that agents are so much better at everything else around software development other than writing code and I don’t understand why everyone focuses so much on it.

• Debugging complex issues? Great.
• Analyzing infra issues from logs? Huge timesaver.
• Quick prototyping and throwaway scripts? Awesome.
• Researching and summarizing stuff? Quite useful, although a bit unreliable.
• Writing code? Mostly garbage code that requires a rewrite to be maintainable.

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I suspect there are a few more aspects:

1. Many (most) developers are not power users and they don’t see the depth of what the platform provides and what they lose by rolling their own implementation. To give a few examples:

• middle-clicking a link to open it in a new tab (doesn’t work with most JS-based “links”)
• keyboard navigation (Alt+<letter> shortcuts in menus, tab order, typing in dropdowns,…)
• consistency with other native controls
• platform integration (password managers, accessibility tooling, navigation history,…)

2. Especially on the web, some platform components are still somewhat broken (e.g., date pickers) or missing (e.g., why is there no browser component for an image gallery and instead every website has its own creatively broken half unusable version? same for rich text editing).

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