The New Craftsmanship - by Alex Kroman - Scaling Notes

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The New Craftsmanship

Alex Kroman<br>Aug 10, 2026

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Some of the best engineers I know have not touched a coding agent. They tried the tools, disliked what came out, and closed the tab. The industry has a category waiting for them: laggards, dinosaurs, the people who scoffed at compilers and source control and were wrong both times. Underneath the name-calling, the holdouts are asking a quieter question than “how do I catch up?” They want to know whether there’s still a place for someone who loves the work itself.<br>There is, and it takes no wishful thinking to make the case. Mechanization has come for a craft before. The branch with the future in it belonged to the craftsmen who made the machine their material, and the people who loved the work were its founders, not its casualties.<br>Thanks for reading Scaling Notes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The refusal is made of the thing that survives

Ask a holdout why they don’t use the tools and you rarely hear “I can’t learn this.” You hear four complaints. The code looks right but isn’t, which is more dangerous than obviously wrong, because it’s engineered to get past your review. Checking it feels like grading a confident student who didn’t do the reading: fluent prose, no understanding underneath, all the real work pushed onto the grader. The workflow is worse than the old one: you used to hold the whole problem in your head and work it; now you type a request, wait, and pull the lever again when the answer disappoints. And the code that comes back often works without being good. It passes the tests while making the system harder to live in, and the tools can’t tell the difference.<br>Every one of those is a quality objection. You cannot be offended by slop without a working definition of good, and a working definition of good is the rarest asset in the transition. Over the next decade the craft itself (writing the code) gets embedded into the machine, the way weaving was embedded into the power loom. What that leaves for humans is the layer above: specify the work, judge the output, handle the exceptions, own the consequences. The engineers refusing the tools on taste grounds are not disqualified from that future. They are walking around with its scarcest input.<br>Managers have seen this before. The hardest person to promote is the best craftsman on the floor, because their standards make delegation painful: every handoff is a small grief about how they’d have done it. But nobody ever concluded that their standards made them unfit to supervise. The standards were the qualification, and the pain was just the price.<br>Craft doesn’t die under mechanization. It splits.

Between 1790 and 1850, skilled artisans met three different fates.<br>Tend the machine. The handloom weavers who kept weaving rode their wages down for forty years. This is the deskilling everyone fears, and it was real: the craft decomposed into machine-minding, at machine tempo, at machine wages. But tending with standards was a different job. The cotton mule spinners ran machines all day and still kept authority over quality, set the pace of the room, and became the best-paid workers on the floor. When the steam press made print cheap and endless, publishing invented the editor; Maxwell Perkins never wrote a novel, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway are hard to imagine without him. Agent-era review works the same way. At the generator’s pace, with standards sanded down to “does it pass CI,” it’s the weaver’s fate — the holdouts are right to refuse that. With the standing to say “this does not ship,” it’s the spinner’s job, or the editor’s. The machines never retired the craftsman’s eye. They raised its price.<br>Retreat to the boutique. William Morris watched industrial goods flood England and built the Arts and Crafts movement in protest: honest materials, hand work, the whole task in one pair of hands. The results were beautiful and the economics were damning. Morris despaired that he was spending his life “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich,” because handmade was now, by definition, what only the rich could buy. A century later the quartz crisis ran the same experiment on Swiss watchmakers: roughly two-thirds of the industry’s jobs gone in fifteen years, then a renaissance in which the mechanical watch came back as a luxury object, the craft more prestigious than ever at a fraction of its former size. Hand-written code will have this market. Safety-critical firmware, cryptographic kernels, the hot path, code where a human name on every line is the product. Prestigious, real, and small — a destination for some, not an answer for a profession.<br>Turn and face the machine. The millwright was the master craftsman of the pre-industrial world — carpenter, mason, smith, and hydraulic engineer in one trade, who could build a mill from the dam to the gear teeth and understood...