Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
March 21, 2026 Why craft-lovers are losing their craft Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven’t been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was invisible: Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. The tools didn’t create a division; they simply revealed an existing one. Orchard himself belongs to the first camp. He learned BASIC at age seven not because BASIC was beautiful but because he wanted things to happen on screen. For him, LLM coding assistants are just another rung on the same ladder he’s always been climbing. The puzzle didn’t disappear; it moved to a higher level…
