Or: "A Spot of Encouraging Philosophy for your Wednesday Lunch"

Code is only as good as the value it provides, say the Thought Leaders™

"Architecture is pragmatic. Scalability is a function of purpose. So is stability. Craft is merely romantic, and love can't buy me money.

You, the coder, and your product, the codebase, can both be Copy-Pasted."

This is not a new topic. It is just a rehash of capitalist nonsense. An objective, algebraic, empirical, sterile, emotionless perspective for the greedy, the obtuse, the base. As Rand herself once said: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." (She was of course sarcastically paraphrasing Emerson, both ironically and pompously failing in so doing.)

Profit != value.
Money != value.
Value is not objective.
Full stop.

If you're #OpenToWork as an engineer, this won't help you make the mortgage. I know. If you're suffocating from the din of crickets, this is of small consolation. I know. But it's not of small import.

Coding, engineering, is the craft of solving problems. As with art, it is the task of creating concrete from the abstract. Turning a concept into a thing. That's the craft part. Craft is art with purpose, corollary to ars gratia artis, not exclusive; both are creative.

If you're #OpenToWork as an engineer right now, in this shitshow of a market, welcome to the world of starving artists. We like Scotch and LoFi, you're one of us, don't be shy. (Or do, we're mostly introverts, too.)

Like illustrators, musicians, et al, the value of code is not inseparable from its execution. There is brilliance and beauty in the simplicity of Pachelbel's Canon. Brilliance and beauty in the line work of Gustav Doré and Shel Silverstein alike. There is tech in technique, if not validation. Tárrega's Gran Vals was not legitimized by Nokia, no moreso than is your work legitimized by whether you worked on the React team, or McMaster Carr, or One Million Checkboxes. Code katas, enterprise frameworks, functional or elegant or goddamn login page, no matter; it is your craft, your name on the commit, whether aided by Claude or reviewed by the Principal. It is your time, your work. It is yours. IP be damned.

So don't fall victim to Van Gogh's imposter syndrome. If you are told that your work is worth only the money it makes, know that Van Gogh sold only a single painting, ever. His entire life; one. Profit is a measure, yes. It is not the measure. Nor shalt thou fall victim to Rand's umbrage, i.e. allow your ego to steer logic...

You must know that Claude is not your enemy. Not because AI is good or evil, for it is a tool and therefore neither; Claude is the product of other engineers. Claude can only copy-paste Monet, it cannot, by definition, be the next Monet. It cannot be the next Linus, the next Bob Martin. Claude cannot innovate. Claude cannot innovate. Claude has zero craft. Claude has no swag, no drip. That's all you, baby.

Your enemy is what Ayn referred to as "the looters and the moochers"; not the hungry and the downtrodden, no! It is those who would stand on your back to reach the top shelf Macallan, with little in the way of a sip for you.

They do not value you.
So your value cannot, must not, be their value.

Your value, your worth, is not:

  • market demand
  • profit
  • most certainly not the moochers' profits

Your value is your own.

You alone determine it, so take joy in your craft, do what you love. Use ternaries and focus on brevity, if that pleases you. Write longform with all the comments in the footnotes of Poe. Be brutalist if you wish, but make it a choice of design, not a velocity metric. Over-engineering is a term created by capitalists, not artists. If you love engineering, and the problem is to cross a river, solve it with the Golden Gate motherfucking Bridge!

And when the day is done, wash it down with a dram. Know that it's not the price tag of the whisky that makes it sweet; it is the barrel: the craft that went into making it. Made all the sweeter as an ends to the means of your ability; the final ingredient.

The purpose of art is neither adulation, accolade, nor value exchange (i.e. paycheck). It is the joy of the creating, the celebration of technique... for the ballerina and the software engineer alike.

Is that romantic? Maybe, whatever. Craft qua craft doesn't pay the mortgage. I know. But it pays you, and there is value in that.

Unless you value only money, you and your code are both worth more than an LLM. Go ye forth and craft.

Homo gratia hominis