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+> "How is it that the wizards of the South - and elsewhere by now, even the chanters of the rafts - all have lost their art, but you keep yours?"
+> 
+> "Because I desire nothing beyond my art," Sparrowhark said.
+
+Programmers are meant to be artists. That is to say, they have an art, a craft. Perhaps you sneer at this idea, perhaps not even unjustly. Maybe you are sick of haughty programmers insisting that everyone "learn to code". 
+Or perhaps you *are* a programmer and you still sneer. You are an *engineer*, not an *artist*. You make useful things, or so you might claim. But what is art, other than deep knowledge well-applied?
+
+There is a way to program, of course, that lacks art entirely. That way is to prompt a large language model to produce code. This has become a very popular way to do things, and the "method" has many evangelists. Even some seemingly skilled programmers are using it in serious projects. Mitchell Hashimoto, for example, uses Claude Code on Ghostty, a terminal emulator, and claims to find it useful. I find the question of whether or not AI is "useful" irrelevant. I hold with Miyazaki: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself". 
+
+> It was clear now that to those who knew the secrets, there were not many secrets to that Art Magic from which Sparrowhawk, and all the generations of sorcerers and wizards, had made much fame and power.
+
+You have, of course, a rejoinder: "sure, sure, programming might *once* have been an art, but that does not mean it will continue to be." And maybe you are right. Maybe programming will go the way of coopery and tanning, becoming irrelevant except as a hobby. Perhaps programming will become more like an assembly line, and the products will come out faster and shittier. Maybe, as with a cheap plastic toy, when something breaks you will just throw it out and get a new one. All the energy that went into making the thing will have been wasted. I hope not, but maybe.
+
+But you are steadfast and insistent: it is good for programming not to be an art. This will *democratize* it! 
+
+Some people seem very excited about the prospect of making shitty things very quickly, and it is telling that they embrace the metaphor of the factory floor. As someone who has actually worked on an assembly line before, this seems like a symptom of madness, or of having no idea what it's like to work in such an environment. The former is debatable, the latter is almost certainly true. Whatever the case, "Gas Town" is *certainly* a symptom of some kind of madness. "You mustn't be afraid of the cost". That cost, my mad friend, comes from something real. The compute costs money because the energy to run it costs money, and the energy costs money because the fuel to run the power plants costs money, and the labour to build and maintain all the parts of the energy grid cost money as well. What is the purpose of wasting all of this? What on earth are the products meant to be? Will anyone want to play a game that has nothing of your soul in it?
+
+In some way, it is hard not to feel like we deserve this. You can slot in whatever definition of "we" you like there, but mostly I mean programmers. Programming has been many things at different times, but the implicit promise for at least a decade has been a high-paying job without having to get your hands dirty. At least, not literally; programmers have been - wittingly or not - Capital's shock troops in the processes of automation and deskilling, in the creation of the gig econonomy, and in the insidious creep of surveillance technologies into every nook and cranny of our lives. Programmers have been *terrible* friends to the rest of the working class, which you can see whenever there's an argument over whether or not programmers even ought to be considered part of the working class. Sitting pretty close to the top of the labour aristocracy, Silicon Valley workers have largely been too complacent to unionize in any meaningful capacity, or to care about solidarity with those who do.
+
+> There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that soon infected the spirit of any visitor. [...] Goods were poor, prices were high, and the markets were unsafe for buyers and vendors alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs.
+
+> "This is evil, evil, what passes on this island: this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of an evil will."