The parable of a sculptor

Logged at IST: 2026-09-27 01:44 IST

What it is: Bhishma Raj uses the analogy of a sculptor whose craft is displaced by 3D-printing machines to describe what LLMs are doing to programming.

Gist: The sculptor's old job joined two things that mattered: the economic activity of making a living and the craft pleasure of shaping material by hand. Once machines can produce sculptures from high-level wishes, the economic work shifts from making to managing. The sculptor still has intent and taste, but the object-level contact with the material is gone.

Raj argues that many programmers are hitting the same split. LLMs turn individual contribution into instruction, review, and orchestration. That may be a higher abstraction, but it is also a role change: many ICs are being pushed toward management of machines even if the thing they enjoyed was the object-level work. The gym analogy is sharp too: once machines replaced economically rewarded physical labor, people started paying gyms to get the benefits of effort. Cognitive gyms may become the equivalent for thinking and programming.

Newsletter angle: Good companion to the recent “AI makes me worse” essays: this one separates productivity from craft, and frames agentic programming as an involuntary migration from maker to manager.