Heralds

For nigh on thirty years, the supreme destruction of software craftsmanship went viral at the pace of a climate change. Now with AI, human craftsmanship in that domain is called truly Useless, because the recipe they design does not matter and will change at any time anyway.

The sum total of labor placed into one iteration is only valuable to spawn the next. This needfully implies that You Are Wasting Time (Money) if you craft too well before the Director of Engineering says you’re switching to new technology. The Director is lying in wait to do just that. They think they are trimming bonsai for the art of an end result, but they have no allegiance to a vision like that either.

No Software Engineer In Cloud Technology was ever valued for their craftsmanship anyway: Sufficiently clever code is indistinguishable from magic. If you know the Arthur C. Clarke quote in full, you know the deeper implication: The observers are morons.

Revenue is not generated by the factory workers admiring awesome work in one handful of parts by one gifted line worker, and no end-user would see it, and so it drives no revenue. More likely it harms revenue, because a manager wants uniform work, something to rely on for its predictable sameness.

Literary and social proses too suffer like this too, as in many industrialized disciplines. For prose, after all, if the audience cannot digest what is written in the first place, the value is instantly measured at zero, even if that is a full-throated lie told by a Moron. For a proof, a novice could impulsively tear it down without ever realizing, and a superior would agree with pedestrian measures of value. The work and its result was not valueless, but the metrics which detail how greatest worth is unwanted at scale.

Should the talented few become drivers of real worth, the universe of workers shrinks. Employers would become beholden to the talented, and the talented would gain leverage with their equity. The Company must not allow value to come from anywhere but the top, else they lose control.

Craftsmanship then goes punished when noticed.

You will easily peruse YouTube to find any number of propaganda men saying it for Likes, the taste of boot on their lips. In their ecosystem of logic, they are right because they are warning you that Craftsmanship is a disease that management openly prevents and quarantines, going on to punish the gifted.

In the hallowed name of Hyper-Scaling, the novice’s mindset thus became so prized. If code cannot be read by peons, it cannot be maintained by peons.

Education and the proliferation of talent is a threat to the technical vision of Good Enough to loot money from a market.

The third-grade reading level in fiction was demonstrably simpler for the unknown audience. The total disregard for audience selection meant they preferred SELECT * FROM humanity; More audience selection is better because ALL desirable Moron Metrics are derived from the size of this selector. Pretentious selection is for the birds, who do not widely possess credit cards.

They want our money, and so they orchestrate products which can steal it away, one month at a time.

Moron Metrics

Famously in the early era of home computing, Steve Jobs cast about for a metric to measure the quality of his engineers. He decreed that the number of lines added by a software engineer would reveal to management the impact of individuals’ labor.

Famously too, Bill Atkinson promptly removed 2k lines of QuickDraw code, and the metric died swiftly.

When a proposed metric does not obviously move the bottom line of the company, it is a Bad Metric, they say. It will not be selected for. It will certainly not be complexly studied to resolve ambiguity. A metric must be simple enough for a novice manager to assess. Only least common denominators have value predictable by Morons.

The metrics of cloud computing are costs and revenues. Cloud providers have captured the entirety of the commercialized web, and their prices are high. (

You should pay exactly zero attention to those who claim Cloud technology is getting cheaper, or that competition will drive it towards cheaper (than what?); We are surrounded by monopolists who inject new behaviors into their technology, to reuse their captured audiences, and the price always goes up.

Always.

You cannot dispute this with a single fiddly line item showing a cost reduction in isolation, when the macroscopic view shows the perpetual rinse and repeat hosing of the entire planet every single financial quarter. Green Line theory hypothesizes that

Monopolies have captured you, and they can make decisions at any moment that their moron-tier metrics must produce more money, and Republican leaders across This Country have actually sued companies for not maximizing financial metrics for the shareholders.

Shareholders most of all are the moron class, the real audience. They care literally nothing for craftsmanship, as long as the moron-tier metrics are fulfilled and more wealth extracted from the underclass. Your addiction and forced dependence make them fantasize about what to do to you next.

Cloud monopolies captured you. It is done and fully over. They insist you rewrite your code over and over with AI agents, on their infrastructure, billed to you. Rewrite it more, they insist. Rewrite it faster and faster.

They’ll even tell you their favorite metric: Don’t pay a human laborer, pay Them. They insist it is cheaper, while they bolt you to a pipeline wherein they alone control all costs.

My favorite independent semi-libertarian commentator and entertainer, Andrew Heaton, is often loud that All Median Prices Are Fair, because price derives from demand. Sorry, Andrew, but You are wholly wrong. The flawed analysis comes well intentioned and stapled to an assumption that monopolies don’t control our markets, while they openly do it, and behave anti-competitively to ensure it. It is their metric of success, and they can spend Negative Money to seize from us any freedom they want for themselves instead.

This Country is terrified of labeling our masters’ monopolies, because an Asymptote Of Monopoly is not yet reached. It is a blindness.

Half Full

Industrialization did this to us, making every franchise the same on purpose to expressly stop creativity and replace it with a minimum standard. Masters brand this minimum as excellence.

Having objectively sacrificed the delight of a specially exceptional piece, we are trained by Them to expect a mass-produced thing, and we are goaded into complaining should the glass ever be less than half full.

You need only look anywhere to find examples. I shall not bore you with a list. Exceptions shall prove the rule.

All things are built to be replicated, and when the DNA is damaged, we complain. The DNA is objectively never spectacular, because the Moron Metrics were picked in such a way that the product literally cannot exceed the expectation.

Really ponder that, if you read past it too easily.

Pivotal

Construction suffered all this too. I once worked in energy efficiency incentive programs in the southwest United States. Home Builders were meeting barest objectives laid out by public utilities and harvesting bounties. Builders were then set upon by Raters, who measured whether or not the Builder could prove they’d done it properly; Even when Builders used the right materials, their implementation was at times useless or sub-par.

Utilities in Arizona paid these Builders to do the job right, and our company helped coordinate these multiple parties to bring plans, robust energy simulations and measured results to the Utility, who was financially invested in the outcome on two sides. Utilities had to pay Builders, from the money Utilities saved by the efficiency.

It was precisely because Builders abandoned their craftsmanship that there was a developing market for this kind of coordination. Builders had gotten obsessed with dumping out anything at all onto a lot, and were compelled by Moron Metrics to do the minimum job possible and then do PR claiming their quarter-full glasses were in fact half full.

Craftsmanship was not suddenly restored, though accountability could be proven. Good actors in the Builder industry could stand out, and Moron actors could simply not participate.

Wood

Craftsmanship cannot be measured or spawned by a Moron Metric. It cannot be done. Mass industrialization defeats the concept by design.

Craftsmanship is so thoroughly defeated that it is my wager you cannot even fathom the original concept, unless you have witnessed it with your own eyes.

Stand within a bespoke construction, cut from wood around the site and assembled with intent. Though a construction may be Ship Of Theseus’d, it must not be the case that it is torn down and remade every time a new type of screw appears in the builder market. The construction must do its job exactly the one time it was built.

Stand for one moment in a no-permit construction, and behold it in silence for a time. Ponder every board and stone and nail, the use of space and limited scope.

Behold something bespoke, and judge whether it excels at filing a stable need. Lack of craftsmanship is ever present, the lack of value implying the hypothetical existence of it elsewhere in some other bespoke thing.

When every part is bespoke and not Industrial Straight, but it was built in full knowledge and acceptance of that, we see intelligence defeating obvious constraints. Consider the novice, who does not reject what they see by moronity, who can plainly observe craftsmanship though they know not whose or why.

Craftsmanship is plain to a novice even while failing to measure the totality of it. They can observe it holding up against elements, abuse and unplanned uses.

Craftsmanship is self-evident, and its value is readily grasped.

If you are a software engineer and your company hates craftsmanship, ponder awhile how it is that you ended up working for a Moron, and quit.

They literally don’t need you.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.