It’s not really about the art. It’s about the part of you that takes materials and creates a thing that you put out in the world. Just like building a fence. Or baking a cake from raw-as-practicable ingredients.

This is both grandiose (look what I did!) and self important (look what I did!). And LLM coding agents are radically changing the connection between you & the materials.

It’s fine that it’s changing.
Code becoming an unimportant detail is fine.
Software Practitioners will be fine.
I will be fine.

But the refrain of “the code was never the point” in response to the lamentation of this foundational shift is dismissive & lacks nuance — it lacks respect.

The journey mattered to those on the fucking journey. It actually wasn’t just about the destination, it was how you got to where you were going.

And it does matter that people feel a sense of… sadness? Loss? that the thing they honed, pined for, and got lost in, is going away. What’s being lost — what’s going away — is not the “typing at the keyboard to put arcane incantations into the ether”, it’s how it feels when you manifest something useful from nothing and share with an audience — a sense of accomplishment.