I get what you mean but I feel this new profound yearning for "hand-crafted" code is getting a bit out of hand. Software engineers have taken shortcuts whenever possible since software was a thing. Do you also mourn that we don't code airplanes by hand anymore (i.e. the death of the "craft of coding").

We need to stop thinking of software as carpenters where the magic is some physical skill and that is the "CRAFT WE MUST PROTECCT".

And at least your comment was grounded in reality; a lot of people I talk to (who are not coders) seem to think a good software engineer writes every line and every word with thoughtful genius and AI just spams code so one is better than the other. And they are convinced its some naunced smart take and they understand software development on a inner level or whatever.

And the base assumption still holds true (pure AI-generated code is garbage) but its mostly because its badly designed and is still a pretty poor architect. And there is a need to pushback against slop but why do we need to elevate typing code as if its some sacred acctivity? Most of the work a good coder does is in their mind with little connection to the phyiscal reality of the world.

In this case you could even replace "LLM" with "C compiler" and it would change nothing.

Look, I still got my physical copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book with its genius content about hand-optimizing cycle count on 486 and Pentium processors, beating compilers at that time.

It was an absolute artform, but completely obsolete by today.