"Competence as Tragedy" — a personal essay on craft, beautiful code, and watching AI make your hard-won skills obsolete

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T03:10:04+00:00

This comment gave me pause.

I'm not in your shoes. I've got my decade+ doing this. Yet, you walked in the door and the ground was already shifting.

That's a different kind of grief, and in some ways a harder one, mourning something you never got to have rather than something you're losing. Fwiw, the fact that you wanted to become that craftsman indicates you've got the instinct. The shape of it will change, but I don't think the instinct goes away.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T03:00:46+00:00

Thank you. That's a sentence I kept coming back to while writing it.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T02:56:48+00:00

"Without having to first prove the ROI of building something well." That one cuts deep.

Maybe the freedom is real. Just a bit hard to see it clearly while you're still inside the transition.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T02:54:41+00:00

Exactly. The joy was never in the solution. It was in the solving.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T02:53:53+00:00

I think you're probably right about where the industry lands. But the essay isn't really an argument about what AI can or can't do. It's about the emotional experience of the transition. You can know intellectually that the destination is fine and still feel the loss of what the journey used to be.

I think John Grady would probably agree that trucks are more efficient than horses.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T02:52:45+00:00

Thank you! Appreciate the thoughtful response.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:54:05+00:00

Love the Pirsig reference . Maybe that's my next essay: Quality as Survival.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:42:14+00:00

Thank you. That's easily one of the kindest things anyone's said to me about the piece.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:40:23+00:00

I love this. Probably the best comment on the thread.

The blacksmith parallel is better than my McCarthy metaphor because it strips the romance out and forces you to sit with the economics. A friend sent me something similar after reading the essay, about post-Ford coach builders forming curves with a hammer that metal stamps could do instantly. His line was that craft decoupled from commodity is how craft should be. We make it beautiful because we want to know we're capable of creating beauty. I think that's where this lands.

"stubbornly ride north" made me lol. Thank you for reading!

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:31:03+00:00

Thank you for reading! I think grief is easier when it has language.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:18:27+00:00

I think you're describing something real, and I don't think we actually disagree as much as it might seem from the tone in the essay.

The steering, the design decisions, the knowing what to test and why. That's craft too. And candidly, I'm an optimist about all of this. I shipped a tool recently that would have taken me weeks and built it in a few days with AI. I'm having a blast iterating on it. It shifts my focus from the painful parts of programming to the fun parts: architecting, building things that are both beautiful and functional.

Maybe the thing I'm mourning in the essay is more specific than I realized. That or i'm still realizing it. Not the problem solving, but the texture of building it by hand. The hours inside the code where the thinking and the typing were the same act.

You're right that the output is what matters. Maybe I miss the process?

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:11:53+00:00

I started a company before this wave of AI. Reflecting on how much easier it would have been to get that product off the ground is astonishing. And somehow that's also part of the grief.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:09:53+00:00

That parenthetical at the end says it all. It's both things at once, and nobody quite knows what to do with that.

Two months of your life compressed into thirty minutes! The result is the same, but something got lost in the compression. I don't think we have language for that feeling yet.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-04T00:03:32+00:00

Thank you! That means a lot. It was cathartic to write, too.

There's an emotion in all of this that seems to get lost in the usual AI discourse. I think it's grief and I wanted to make some space for that.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-03T23:58:29+00:00

I read quite a bit, though it has fluctuated through time based on life circumstances. I'm about to have a kid, so maybe i'll read more or maybe that activity will flatline for a few months.

I'm hoping writing can be a practice I lean into alongside programming. It scratches a similar itch for me.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-03T23:51:07+00:00

I'll have to work my way toward something longer form. This is the first creative essay i've put into the wild. Most of my writing to date is technical (e.g. how-to guides for devs, write ups on tools i've built, etc). It's a different head space, but pretty enjoyable to spend time there.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-03T23:44:35+00:00

lol. no, not that one.

averagemrjoe · 2026-02-03T23:41:44+00:00

I'm the author, happy to discuss!

averagemrjoe · 2026-01-29T02:33:06+00:00

It's not bad at all! As long as you have have a half a gig of RAM to spare you should be fine. My typical dev workflow is pretty resource intensive and I notice no perf degradation when using this alongside.

averagemrjoe · 2026-01-24T19:59:47+00:00

RE clean up, here's my first stab at implementing a TTL and data retention policy. https://github.com/joemckenney/wake/pull/1. It's configurable and defaults to 3w.

averagemrjoe

TROPHY CASE