I really took the "craft" aspect of software to heart when I joined the industry (~2004). I was in R&D, had great mentors, and worked for years that way, very happily.
When I moved to SV and joined Amazon, and later, a startup, the feedback I consistently got was "never spend that much time on <task> again" -- the business itself was putting hard downward pressure on the quality I wanted to produce, and I was never a super-fast programmer, so it was a tough lesson for me. I remember taking it hard at the time, telling my boss "I joined so I could learn how to write mediocre software". It was a crappy thing to say, but it was how I felt in that moment; it seemed like I was being held back from doing my "craft" thing because of the business. I guess you could say I mourned, but more accurately, I recalibrated what the heck I was doing. This was around the time DEI was taking off and I was doing trainings about all the different sorts of privilege I was enjoying, and I realized that me whining about not being able to practice my special "craft" was the privilege talking. There was never a rule that I got to do what I wanted for money, and I needed to respond to what my employers were telling me: the most beautiful code in the world doesn't pay the bills.
It's been about 15 years since then, and I mostly practice "craft" programming in my hobby projects, and focus on "industrial" programming for work. I view the sentiment in that YT comment about AI in sort of the same way: everyone wants AI to automate away they things they don't enjoy, and they are distressed at the prospect that AI will automate away the thing they love doing. In the time of AI, my craft hobby coding projects have fallen to the wayside a bit as I use AI for more coding -- I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I enjoy being architect/product manager/QA tester. I spent this past weekend building a city simulator in WebGL, and it was a ton of fun.
When I moved to SV and joined Amazon, and later, a startup, the feedback I consistently got was "never spend that much time on <task> again" -- the business itself was putting hard downward pressure on the quality I wanted to produce, and I was never a super-fast programmer, so it was a tough lesson for me. I remember taking it hard at the time, telling my boss "I joined so I could learn how to write mediocre software". It was a crappy thing to say, but it was how I felt in that moment; it seemed like I was being held back from doing my "craft" thing because of the business. I guess you could say I mourned, but more accurately, I recalibrated what the heck I was doing. This was around the time DEI was taking off and I was doing trainings about all the different sorts of privilege I was enjoying, and I realized that me whining about not being able to practice my special "craft" was the privilege talking. There was never a rule that I got to do what I wanted for money, and I needed to respond to what my employers were telling me: the most beautiful code in the world doesn't pay the bills.
It's been about 15 years since then, and I mostly practice "craft" programming in my hobby projects, and focus on "industrial" programming for work. I view the sentiment in that YT comment about AI in sort of the same way: everyone wants AI to automate away they things they don't enjoy, and they are distressed at the prospect that AI will automate away the thing they love doing. In the time of AI, my craft hobby coding projects have fallen to the wayside a bit as I use AI for more coding -- I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I enjoy being architect/product manager/QA tester. I spent this past weekend building a city simulator in WebGL, and it was a ton of fun.