[internet2000]

This analogy falls flat because

a) Carpentry already happens in the real world

b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture).

Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focused on the wrist mechanics of rubbing sandpaper up and down, you'd be disappointed.

[tadfisher]

Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with impedance mismatches and want to scream and laugh and cry. There is a piece of us that lives in what we build. It's evidence that we are real.

This ties in with your second point. There are uncountably many ways to accomplish the goal of making a chair or writing a program. And if you are a carpenter working on a one-off matched dining set for a fickle client, the problem might not be as clear as even many software tasks are. Your skill and experience is highly likely to play into the eventual form and structure of the finished work. The customer might not know where you hid the dovetail joints or dominoes, but they can absolutely notice the grain continuity and lack of obvious engineered joinery evident in a factory piece.

If you don't care, then fine! You can focus on the other things that bring you joy. But I hope you can appreciate that some of us want to experience solving these problems with a bicycle for the mind instead of a Waymo.

[harrall]

There’s a third group of people: people who did it, got good at it, and got bored.

I do both carpentry and programming and both activities have long since become repetitive. There are only so many dovetails or distributed systems you can make.

That’s why I don’t care if AI can replace those parts. I’m in it to do the designing, not the crafting.

[layer8]

> pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander.

That analogy falls flat, because there is little creative difference between these two modes of sanding. In particular, there is approximately zero variation in what the belt sander does as a function of how you control it. It is a reliable, deterministic, very predictable tool. That’s as different from generative AI as a compiler is.