Dont lose your craft

Your craft is something unique about you. It’s built around the skill set you’ve been working on for all these years. It’s the output of all the experience and knowledge you’ve gained.

One of the critical parts of your craft is your thought process. It begins with a thought (e.g., how does this sort function work), it mixes reasoning (e.g., it uses buckets to split work) and provokes new thoughts (e.g., could recursiveness help here).

When you start using LLM-based generational tools, you start to notice a crazy feeling inside you. That feeling of writing something and then getting instant results. But slowly, you start noticing a degradation in your thought process. You’re used to getting things done quickly, so why waste time thinking and curating a question that humans understand, when these tools can infer your thought?

Things get worse when you start using agentic tools. These tools have harnesses (or whatever they call it these days), fine-tuned for the type of work you’re doing. The tips and tricks you’ve been collecting all these years? All gone to waste because the tool does it faster (or better) than you.

You question yourself: why waste time when these tools do it better? This is where things start going downhill because you slowly devote yourself to the machine. You start asking it to do things outside the scope of your work. You ask it to write things for you. You ask it to curate the shopping list. Search the web. Summarize your colleague’s messages. Compare products.

Congratulations, you automated yourself. You traded time for speed, but lost interest during the process. You think that you’re controlling the machine, but it’s the other way around. Your craft is now broken. You can’t think straight. You can’t write a simple essay describing your work. You can’t tear down a problem. Your urge to use these amazing tools is the same as hopping into a train and grabbing your phone.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to put the blame on you and make a judgment of it. But you have to make sure that you’re fully in control of the operation. Keep an interest in the things that you’re using it for. Craft your prompts with care, not just to get the job done. Automate the work with the tricks you know and note down the new ones. Keep reasoning about why the tool went down a path, and not the one you would go for. Review the work it produces, because at the end of the day, it’s you who is delivering it.

Don’t lose your craft by devoting yourself to the machine. Use it to get better every day, not worse.