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Personally I always tried to be a software artisan doing highly detailed well done work, and I'm trying and will try to do the same with AI… A friend posted yesterday something like "you do you, but for me the product is better when you love your craft" and it bugged me because I *do* love my craft

I don't think artisans exclusively own the idea of doing good work. Rather, artisinal work is distinguished by being in some manner un-scalable. A bespoke suit is valuable both because it is tailor-made for the individual customer *and* because the buyer places value on work done by hand.

11/8/26, 7:01 pm0 reposts16 likes

That's a valid choice, and there are valid businesses that work in that manner! But it's not the primary economic mode of software development, and in fact it's not clear to me you can make a software business that is "handmade" (and fetches premium or luxury prices to compensate).

I think instead many software developers have gotten away with acting as artisans within an enterprise because even production-level software work is historically slow and labor-intensive, and so the slowness of an artisan was within an often-acceptable bound in an enterprise.

Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦

@mackuba.eu

Yeah tbh I'm talking more about indie / OSS stuff

Yeah, that's fair! It's absolutely a space where programmers who don't want to be bound by the limits of the enterprise have tried to construct alternative modes of engaging with capital! I wonder if OSS would exist or be as big if it were easier/possible to sell artisinal and/or luxury software.