What the camera did to painting
It feels like we're all just going to have to raise the bar for what good or great looks like, in the light of these tools existing. So it's like you're changing the dynamics of what does it mean to do good.
If you think about an artist that can paint quite well: we have cameras that can take pictures, but we still appreciate people that can do paintings. There's a space for that. But it's now more artisanal than functional. And I think developers have always been both artisanal and functional at the same time.
Now we have the camera that can take an exact representation. But even with the camera, there are really good photographers that can really take really good pictures: understand lighting, set the mood, all those sorts of things. If you put that same camera in the hands of a really, really good cameraman, you can probably do more with it.
If your identity is stuck up in the fact that you can code beautifully, you definitely struggle in this era. But if coding was just a means to justify a different end, I think it just raises the bar for what that end looks like.
Said out loud in a team meeting, 13 March 2026. Trimmed for filler; not rewritten.