Burkov on AI replacing coders: hand-crafting code is fine, but business always picks efficiency
burkov · x · 2026-10-02
Andriy Burkov, author of The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, weighs in on researchers and software engineers feeling depressed that AI now does much of their work.
His take: if writing code by hand still brings you joy, nothing stops you from doing it — some artisans still make nails manually or restore old cars. But business always shifts to more efficient approaches, and adopting AI is exactly such a shift. No client will pay $10 per artisanal nail for a modern house, so contractors use mass-produced nails — and that doesn't make their work less exciting.
He closes with a quip: if a house-printing technology arrives tomorrow, construction workers will be delivering entire neighborhoods complete with underground tunnels, nuclear bunkers, and alpine ski hills.
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