Thorsten Ball, preaching craft right now is the wrong advice
He is not saying good architecture stopped mattering, he is saying nobody knows what will matter.
Thorsten Ball took aim at a specific kind of senior engineer post, the one that concedes AI might change some things while insisting the real value was always deep knowledge, good code and great architecture. He calls the people who write them Stewards of the Craft of Programming, and says the genre bugs the hell out of him.
But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.
This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
His objection is not that craft is worthless. He says some of it is true, at least he thinks so, and that the fundamentals might well still be valued. The problem is the certainty. Nobody truly knows what will be important in the future, so sermons delivered with that much confidence are doing something other than informing.
The comfort is the problem
What they do, in Ball's reading, is let people feel comfortable at a moment when they should not. He spells out the internal monologue the sermon produces, what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy. His line is that if you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
The sting is aimed at who is doing the preaching. Ball singles out senior engineers who are secure in their career, talking as if there is nothing really to change. The people being told to relax are the ones with the least cushion if the advice is wrong.
What he suggests instead
His alternative is not a tool or a workflow. Keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, work out from what businesses value what you can provide. He argues the digital world is more malleable than ever and that is the thing worth reacting to, rather than assuming the 2024 playbook carries forward intact.
For working engineers, this is the fundamentals argument moved off the code review and onto career advice. The usual version is about whether an agent writing the code means you still need to understand the code. Ball's version is about a junior deciding what to spend the next two years learning, where the cost of betting on the wrong set of skills is paid by someone who did not get to make the call.
Note what he is not claiming. He does not say deep knowledge of languages and systems is now useless, and he does not offer a replacement list. The entire argument is that the honest position is uncertainty, and that dressing uncertainty up as timeless craft is how the secure reassure themselves in public.
Have the good opinion, not the loud one
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