Beauty, Infinite Software

We are reaching an inflection point where software, and the means of creating it, starts to feel free.

Not free like “no cost.”

Free like “no friction.”

Free like the thing that used to take you a week now takes you an hour, and the hour is mostly you staring at the problem, not typing.

Hand-rolling code is going to become what hand-building furniture is.

Not embarrassing.

Not obsolete.

Just a different kind of choice.

A craft choice.

A taste choice.

Sometimes you do it because you have to.

Sometimes you do it because you love it.

And sometimes you do it because you don’t trust the machine with that part yet.

Will I miss it?

Yes.

Not in the abstract.

In the small, stupid, intimate ways.

The moment the diff becomes clean.

The moment the names finally feel honest.

The moment a system stops fighting you and starts agreeing with you.

But it is being replaced by something bigger.

Something that does not care that I learned to love the struggle.

Something that will not get tired at 2:13am.

Something that will not start bargaining with itself after the third bug.

We are not losing software. We are losing the scarcity of making it.

scarcity of implementation  →  abundance of implementation
abundance of output         →  scarcity of taste

Code gets cheaper
Judgment gets expensive

Scarcity made a lot of our opinions feel like laws.

Because when making the thing was hard, the person who could make it looked like the point.

Beauty was never just the UI.

I have an eye for aesthetics.

For what something says without saying anything at all.

And code, when you are doing it by hand, has its own kind of beauty.

Not pixels.

Structure.

Restraint.

The way a boundary holds.

The way a name tells the truth.

The way the system avoids surprising you.

We used to argue about beautiful code.

Not because we were bored.

Because we were paying for every decision with time, and so the decisions mattered.

Now the machine will make the decisions for hours without blinking.

And sometimes, when I catch myself writing boilerplate by hand, I feel something I didn’t expect to feel this early:

Waste.

Not because writing code is beneath me.

Because I can feel, viscerally, that I’m spending my brain on the cheapest part of the work.

I know Claude Code or Codex can do what I’m about to do.

It’s a prompt away.

And it will probably do it cleaner.

Not because I’m bad.

Because it doesn’t pay the same costs.

It doesn’t ration attention.

It doesn’t get emotionally attached to a decision it made ten minutes ago.

It doesn’t flinch when it has to delete a hundred lines.

It just deletes them.

When implementation becomes cheap, taste becomes the bottleneck.

This is where people get confused.

They hear “AI writes code” and they think the story is about code.

It isn’t.

Infinite software does not automatically mean beautiful software.

It means infinite almost-right.

Infinite “it works.”

Infinite output that looks competent until you live with it.

Beauty is not output.

Beauty is coherence.

Beauty is constraint.

Beauty is what you refuse to build.

Beauty is choosing the right simplicity, not the fastest one.

We are moving into a world where you can generate ten implementations before lunch.

And the real work will be choosing which one is true.

Not true like “it compiles.”

True like it will still make sense six months from now when you are tired and you forgot why you did it.

True like the next human can inherit it without inheriting your confusion.

The artisan era is not dead. It is repositioned.

Hand-written code will not vanish.

It will become deliberate.

It will be reserved for the places where you can feel the abstraction crack.

For the places where the machine is still guessing.

And I think that is what I’m grieving.

Not that the work disappears.

That the meaning moves.

That the thing I used to do to feel close to the system is no longer required to ship the system.

There are people already living in the new world.

Boris, who created Claude Code, said he’s been shipping PR after PR written by Opus + Claude Code.

Hundreds.

That isn’t a gimmick.

That is a professional choosing a new unit of leverage.

The future is not “AI writes code.” The future is “humans spend taste on the right constraints.”

So will I miss it?

Yes.

I’ll miss the artisanal part.

But I won’t pretend scarcity was the point.

Beauty was always the point.

Now we just don’t get to hide behind difficulty anymore.