Handmade code needs a WARNING label

That demand says nothing about the actual work, though. Calculating by hand was respected work once, with whole floors of human computers at their machines, and today nobody would brag about a week spent on an equation a computer solves in a few seconds.

A long hall of rows of clerks, most of them women, each at a mechanical calculating machine, under a sign that reads Computing Division, Computing Section. The US Veterans Bureau’s Computing Division in 1924, from the Library of Congress.

Meticulously handcrafted software is heading the same way. We built it for years, at its high price and with its own trade-offs, and now deliberate work with agents can reach the same bar in a fraction of the time, which is what the laws of the globally accelerating market enforce.

And agents bring to that work what no one can keep up for long. They hold far more of a system in view, able to weigh and quick-test dozens of assumptions, reason over the results, and talk to the language server and the profiler instead of going on a hunch. With Hypha Stack, most decisions are taken before a model writes a line, and everything after is held by enforced boundaries, the shared ontology, gates no one can skip and validation that proves every change against the agreed scenarios.

What’s known as “AI slop” exists, of course, and so does the handmade kind (known as “shitcode”). But writing off a whole body of work for the tools behind it is an idiotic prejudice, with the blast radius of any other. I believe it grows in communities that pay for visible effort in stars and respect, and an agent that delivers the same quality without that much labour makes their currency worth less. What I personally need is a solved problem, a working result I can trust, and I couldn’t care less how it was done.

I find it reasonable to start labelling “HANDMADE” explicitly, like a cup from a market stall, so everyone knows up front it’s the personal taste and approach of whoever made it. It could be graded too, after some mandatory qualification path, so you know before you install it whether that handmade code can be trusted at all, or you’re trying to sell us another piece of pointless rubbish you spent so much time creating.

Yeah, I see your project on GitHub, cool. Handmade disclosure?