The Two Kinds of Developer Grief (And Why Both Matter)

~15 min read

AI-assisted coding has done something odd. It didn't just change how we write code. It exposed a divide that was always there but easy to miss when we all worked the same way.

For years, we sat next to each other. Same editors. Same pull requests. Same languages. We shipped the same products. From the outside, we looked indistinguishable. But the reason we got into this work? That was never the same. Some of us were here for the craft. Some of us were here for what the craft makes possible. And until recently, that didn't matter. We all typed the code.

Now there's a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built. Or you can insist on hand-crafting it. Suddenly the choice becomes visible. And so does the grief that comes with it.

The split that was always there

Think of it like two people who both love cooking. One loves the feel of the knife, the sound of the sizzle, the meditative rhythm of chopping. The other loves feeding people. The food on the table. The fact that nobody's hungry. They both show up to the same kitchen. They both make dinner. But if you handed one of them a meal-prep service that did the chopping and stirring, you'd get very different reactions. One might feel robbed. The other might feel freed.

Developers are like that. The craft-lovers got into this because they love the texture of the work. The bug that finally relents at 2 AM. The elegant solution. The GitHub repo that says "I made this." The make-it-go people got into this because they wanted to build things. They learned BASIC not because it was beautiful but because they wanted to make something happen on screen. The result mattered. The process was a means to an end.

Before AI, both camps did the same thing every day. The motivation was invisible because the process was identical. Now the process has split. And the grief has split too.

Craft grief: missing the doing

Some developers are mourning the craft itself. The feeling of holding code in your hands and shaping it. The satisfaction of an elegant solution. The sense of discovery when you figure something out through persistence and ingenuity. One developer put it like this: the wonder is harder to access. Something has been compressed. Not eliminated, but compressed. And something is lost in the compression.

"We'll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay. We'll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We'll miss the satisfaction of the artist's signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying 'I made this.'" Nolan Lawson, "We Mourn Our Craft"

That's real. I'm not here to argue otherwise. If the craft is what got you out of bed, and the craft is changing, then you're losing something. No amount of "just adapt" or "think of it as a power tool" addresses that. The satisfaction you got from the act itself isn't something you can logic your way out of missing.

We've been lucky. There's been a livelihood in craft up to now. Not every profession can say that. But that doesn't make the loss less real for the people feeling it.

Context grief: missing the world around it

Other developers are grieving something different. Not the act of writing code. The world around the code. The ecosystem. The career landscape. The sense that the ground under your feet is shifting.

Maybe you grieve for the open web. The one where small sites could thrive and the commons felt like a shared project. AI training on the commons, the consolidation of who gets to shape how people experience the internet. That's a real loss. It doesn't go away because you're personally more productive.

Maybe you grieve for the career landscape. You've been doing web dev or backend work or whatever your thing is for years. Now AI engineering is the hot field. Mobile took some bites. AI is taking more. You've been worried whether you can make that shift. Maybe you have. But the anxiety is genuine. And it might not be finished.

Here's what I notice about this kind of grief: none of it is about missing the act of writing code. It's about the context. The reasons why we're doing any of this. The world changing around the work. That's a different kind of loss than mourning the craft itself.

Why both matter

Recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the useful part. Not so you can rank them or dismiss one. Both are real. Both deserve to be named. But they lead to different responses.

If you're in the craft camp and someone tells you to redirect your passion or embrace the new tools, it might land wrong. You're not resisting change because you're stubborn. You're losing something you valued. That's valid. You might need to find that satisfaction elsewhere. In a side project. In a different kind of work. Or you might need to sit with the fact that work is going to feel different. Both are okay.

If you're in the context camp, the grief is real but there are things you can do. Learn the new tools. Advocate for the open web, even if it's a small corner of it. Grieve and adapt at the same time. You don't have to choose.

And some of us are in both. That's allowed. Grief isn't tidy.

What to do with it

I don't celebrate the new world, but I also don't resist it. That's how one developer put it. The sun rises, the sun sets. We orbit around it. Our protests can't stop it. It doesn't care. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend everything is fine. Or that we have to pretend everything is terrible.

If you're feeling something, name it. Craft or context. Both or neither. Just naming it helps. It doesn't fix anything. But it helps you figure out what to do next. And it helps you recognize that the person next to you might be grieving something different. They're not wrong. You're not wrong. You're just not the same.

One small step: the next time you talk to a developer who seems off about AI tools, ask what kind of grief they're carrying. Not in those exact words. Just "what's getting to you about it?" Listen for whether it's the craft or the context. It might change how you respond. And it might help them feel less alone.

Sources and further reading

• Grief and the AI Split (Les Orchard)
• We Mourn Our Craft (Nolan Lawson)
• The thing I loved has changed (James Randall)
• Nostalgia is an anchor (Kevin Lawver)