The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up.

The woodworker had a way of running his fingers along the grain before making the first cut. A ritual -- the wood had something to say, and he was listening, and he loved it. Not the completed chair, really, or the money, not even the praise, but the work itself. The resistance of the material. The correction of mistakes. The slow, deliberate shaping of something real.

Then the new machines arrived. They were faster, precise, consistent; they could cut in minutes what took him hours. Designs could be generated, adjusted, and executed without a human ever touching the wood.

Nothing stopped him from continuing as before. No one forbade him or chained his hands.

And yet, we are told, something tragic occurred.

The market "pressured" him. Clients wanted faster delivery. Prices adjusted and expectations shifted. We are told that he reluctantly, even tragically, set aside the chisel and picked up the machine. And with that, we are asked to believe, he lost his love.

What kind of creature is this? What sort of being abandons the work he claims to love because a faster method exists? What sort of passion evaporates the moment efficiency enters the room? Is man's devotion so fragile that it cannot survive the existance of a tool?

Am I to believe that the human soul is so fragile that it must be protected from human-made tools in order to remain whole?

If that is true, then the Luddites was right; they are protectors of human condition. Smash the machines, for they threaten not your job, but your ability to care, love, and be human.

Absurdity. A tool cannot make you stop loving your craft. All this just reveals what you valued all along.

At this point, the modern explanation arrives, with all its intellectual seriousness: alienation.

We are told that what the craftsman feels is insight. That he is not abandoning his work, but being separated from it. The problem itself reveals the structure in which the choice is made.

And so we are handed Marx: alienation from one's human essence, imposed by the system that deploys them.

It is a compelling story to some

It is total nonsense. It rests on a premise that the individual is not the final authority over his own life.

If his reason, values and choices were primary, then no system could take his craft from him. It could change incentives and tradeoffs, but it could not reach inside him and remove what he loves.

To say that he is "alienated" means that his relationship to his own work is determined not by him, but by external conditions. That is a straight denial of the craftsman.

If you want to understand this more clearly, it's worth watching Nikos Sotirakopoulos's (@Nikos_17) talk "Marx Hated YOU More than he Hated Capitalism."

Marx's deepest objection was not profits or markets as such, but the kind of person capitalism allows to exist: an individual with reason, goals, and the conviction that his life is his to live.

Capitalism matters because it protects that separation, through rights, property, and liberty. It allows you to live your life as yours.

In "On the Jewish Question", Marx doesn't celebrate rights. Rights are criticized as expressions of the "isolated, self-interested individual." From this perspective, capitalism is not the the final villian; it is simply the environment where the real problem thrives: the independent individual.

Which means that when Marx speaks of alienation, he is not defending your personal relationship to your work. He is challenging the idea that such a relationship is yours to define in the first place.

Seen in that light, the modern lament about tools becomes clearer. The developer who says, "I am being pushed away from coding" is not describing a literal force. He is describing a tension between what he enjoys and what the world rewards.

That tension is real. But it is not new. And it is not unique to capitalism. And it is certainly not caused by LLMs. It is the basic condition of being a human who must choose.

Speaking as a developer, this becomes obvious the moment you step outside the romantic framing. I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.

None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certianly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.

And the most importantly, they don't choose. That part is still yours. The real work of software development, the part that makes someone valuable, is knowing what should exist in the first place, and why.

If you reduce yourself to "the one who types code," then yes, you should feel obsolete. But don't fool yourself any further: typing code that was never the essence of the craft.

The idea that LLMs are "taking away" coding is the same illusion as the woodworker. Just as higher level languages didn't destroy programming, nad compilers didn't destroy engineering, and cloud didn't destroy infrastructure work, LLMs do not destroy coding.

The real danger is that people stop thinking. The actual trap is engineers letting the tool carry the cognitive load they were meant to build -- The abdication of reason from within.

I don't see any of this as a tragedy. Because the capacity for good craftsmaship remains. The same tools that let someone drift into shallow work are the tools that let someone else build at a level that was previously impossible.

The domain of what can be built is growing and leverage of human reason is increasing. And that creates a split -- not between "alienated" and "fulfilled," but between those who adapt their thinking and those who retreat into anemoia.

No matter what tools arrive, no matter how powerful they become, they will always remain tools. They won't replace our reason nor values. You will still choose what is worth building. And as long you reason, nothing essential has been lost.