A dichotomy that doesn't fit

Software discourse splits people into "serious" engineers who care about the result and "artisanal" coders who care about the experience. Plenty of us are neither.

Reliability needs patience

Designing a program from the ground up, slowly, is how you get to know it is correct. Any bug left is a typo, not a misunderstanding.

Ninety-nine percent isn't it

Unit tests, LLM reviews and provers can get code to 99% right. They can't promise it's optimal, maintainable, and free of undocumented behavior it quietly depends on.

“Unit tests, LLM reviews, and provers can guarantee the code is 99% right, but not that it's 100% right”

Why no LLMs

LLMs isolate you from the low-level details that decide correctness, and they can't give you correctness by construction. So the author refuses them.

The subtext in the label

If "artisanal programmer" is the opposite of "software engineer", the label quietly says people who write code by hand aren't engineers at all.

Engineering means care

Care, attention and precision are what engineering has always meant. The term now belongs to people whose job looks more like managing an assistant.

“Care, attention, and precision are the defining characteristic of engineering”

The values flipped

Developers once mocked "move fast and break things" and fought management for tech debt time. Now spending time on reliability reads as unserious.

Hillel Wayne got it backwards

In his 2021 crossover project, engineers from other fields said software engineering is real engineering. Wayne called the careful ones engineers and the rest craftsmen.

“Not everybody who works with electricity is going to be an electrical engineer; many will be electricians. And this is okay.”

Who gave up the word

Claiming "artisanal" handed over "engineer" for free, and settled the question of whether vibecoding counts as engineering without anyone arguing it.

Not a normal argument

Old fights were about which type system or framework was more reliable. Both sides were still programmers. This one says one side isn't doing the job at all.

“It's an attack on an identity.”

Spread like a meme

Within about a month of the joke "the antonym of vibecoder is software engineer", everyone had adopted "artisanal programmer". No natural reason, just speed.

Gamers defend artists, not coders

People who hate AI art flip instantly on software: LLM code is fine, everyone uses it, no disclosure needed. They're not experts, so rhetoric beats facts.

“Real composers call themselves composers, not artisan composers”

Anti-intellectualism did this

Rust was dismissed as raw math, Haskell still is, and pointers count as hard because you have to learn something first. We want easy, meaning we'd rather not read.

“We yearn for easy solutions, but what we actually mean by that is that we refuse to read”

Better words, better fight

Use "AI-assisted coding" and "AI-free software engineering". Keep the disclosure, drop the word that makes careful work sound like a weekend hobby.