Building Software Is a Craft

The Craft Is Changing

Building software is a craft. Each program is a cathedral of code, painstakingly built by teams of people over years. Some are so valuable that only the richest companies in the world can afford to buy them. And when they do, it counts as a good investment.

But the craft is changing. As we grow comfortable with AI writing code, the material we build with is disappearing from our day-to-day. A study of 442 developers found that the work is moving from writing code to reviewing, validating, and debugging it, with burnout climbing alongside. And the ones burning out are not the holdouts. They are the people who care most, drowning in code reviews, watching the craft they loved die.

See, we are shifting from creators to orchestrators, from builders to overseers, and this shift is so fast we almost don't know who we are. At Craftmill, our answer is simple: we are software builders. The craft was never the typing. It was the building. The real question is, how does one build today?

What History Teaches Us

Luckily, we have history to learn from. Craftspeople have faced automation before, and the record is clear about what works. The ones who refused the machines lost. So did the ones who let the machines set the pace and spent their days feeding them. The ones who came out ahead learned the new tools and made those tools work for them. It wasn't always easy for them. Many of their first attempts didn't work. But their efforts kept their crafts alive.

The Software Factory for Craft

One clear tool in the tool belt of building software via agents is agentic orchestration. Many of us today are doing this via prompts, but the non-determinism of an LLM makes it an untrustworthy orchestrator. A software factory moves the orchestration out of the prompt and into a defined line of work: named steps and a quality gate at each one that the work has to clear before it moves on. It is a process the builder can craft, rather than a queue of agent sessions the dead-inside can respond to.

On its surface, I'll admit, a software factory sounds like the opposite of saving the craft. Some look at the goal of the factory as removing people altogether. How is there a craft if there are no craftspeople? But a factory mass-producing a physical good removes the artisans because the good is finished when it leaves the line. Software is never finished. It is maintained for years, and that depends on people who care what it is and how it works, and who have the taste to shape its next version. That is our part. The factory's part is taking our inputs and typing out the code.

To get there though, we need an open standard to describe software factories. At Craftmill, that is what we are going to build next. But we can't be the only ones. If you are interested in helping out or following along, let us know.