洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)

This piece appears to be a response to my recent essay on craft, alienation, and LLMs, so let me engage with it directly.

The argument collapses every social and structural explanation into a single move: the individual chose it. This is the classic libertarian reduction, and it has a well-known failure mode. Under this framework, there is no coherent distinction between a choice made under duress and a choice made freely. If a developer uses LLM coding assistants because their livelihood depends on keeping pace with colleagues who do, and the author's response is that no one forced them, well, no one forces a person at gunpoint to hand over their wallet either. The gun is still there.

The author acknowledges, mid-essay, that the system “can change incentives and tradeoffs.” But this is precisely what a structural analysis is. Once you admit that incentives can be arranged such that a person has no viable path except the one the system rewards, you have already conceded the core Marxian point. Calling it “alienation” or not is just terminology.

What the alienation framework actually claims is not that individuals don't choose. It's that the conditions under which those choices are made matter morally and analytically. My own essay is careful about this: I noted explicitly that the tension between craft and efficiency doesn't vanish under different political arrangements. The question survives capitalism; capitalism just answers it harshly. Dismissing this as a “denial of the craftsman” misreads the argument.

On LLM capabilities: the claim that none of these problems can be solved by LLMs (understanding systems, architecture decisions, debugging) reads as confident as of roughly two years ago. The frontier has moved. Coding agents are already handling non-trivial architectural reasoning in constrained domains, and the trajectory is visible. Anchoring the argument to current limitations, stated as permanent ones, is a move that ages badly.

[Also cross-posted to Lobsters and Hacker News threads.]

TypeScript 6.0 is now available!

This release brings better type-checking for methods, new standard library features, new module features for Node.js, and more!

But most important, this release brings us one step closer to the upcoming native-speed 7.0!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-6-0/

Ditto:

'Why are you still on Bluesky too?'

'But did you *delete* your Twitter account?'

’You said you switched to Proton mail too, oh that’s bad, once someone at Proton said something’

It’s nice to see new neighbours move into the Fediverse. It feels unwelcoming to see people immediately interview them about the purity of their intentions. Or telling them You’re Doing It Wrong. They've just arrived on a journey away from Big Tech. Maybe they'd prefer to be offered a seat and a cup of tea.

Every time a newcomer posts an introduction and somebody tells them they shouldn’t have joined Mastodon.social and need to move to a different server, an angel loses their wings.

@BoydStephenSmithJr Yeah, actually, I'd rather use PureScript than TypeScript too. 😂

@evan Haha, well if that's the case, how about upgrading to the latest version of Node.js? The latest Node.js version can run TypeScript files natively!

@sublimer はい、それにNode.js単体では型チェックも行われませんよね。ただ、簡単なスクリプトを書く際にはかなり便利だと思います。（型チェックはVisual Studio Codeのようなエディタで行われると想定した場合）

Node.jsでTypeScript使えるやつはあくまでも型情報を落としているだけなので、Node.jsでTypeScriptを直接実行できるけどV8が直接実行しているわけではない
V8が直接TypeScript実行できるようになったらブラウザでもTypeScript使えるようになるのかな

FYI, the latest Node.js can run TypeScript code directly without a build process using the node script.ts command.

@evan I'm not sure if you'll like it, but why don't you give Deno a try? You can run .ts files directly without a separate build pipeline.

@mariusor Deno might be it, but it's run by a VC-funded startup… 😂

@SRAZKVT Yeah, its governance is indeed problematic. I hope they migrate their governance on TypeScript to an independent foundation.

@Razemix Yeah, for simple projects, transpilation would be overkill indeed. By the way, that's why I'd preferred Deno over Node.js. Node.js also transforms TypeScript code by default though.

@gosha Haha, I've always had my doubts about Rails' aesthetics.

@abnv Yeah, that's fair enough indeed!

Is anyone still sticking to #JavaScript instead of using #TypeScript? If so, why are you sticking with it? Please let me know your reasons!

TSKaigi 2026に採択されました。「TypeScriptのclassはなぜこうなったのか」というタイトルで、classの歴史的経緯・落とし穴・使いどころを体系的に整理する30分セッションです。

https://kosui.me/posts/2026/03/tskaigi

📢TSKaigi 2026の基調講演は、MicrosoftのPrincipal Software Engineer、Jake Bailey氏をお迎えします。

TypeScriptチームでパフォーマンスやインフラ、エコシステム整備を主に担当されています。 タイトルは『TS7: How We Got There』。「中の人」のご登壇をお楽しみに！

https://x.com/tskaigi/status/2035661614847001050?s=20

残念ながら落ちてしまった。😭

まあ、それでも参加はするけどね。

https://tskaigi.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/03/22/185722

TSKaigi 2026 プロポーザル採択者発表 https://tskaigi.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/03/22/185722

ついに発表された

We make our choices, and then our choices make us.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/01/ethics-of-small-actions/

TSKaigi 2026の登壇者募集、数日前に締め切られたんだな。私が出したプロポーザルは通るかな？

Quick vibe check on @elk usage.

👉 Have you been using #Elk web app (https://elk.zone)?

Please #boost for science :) We have been discussing the future of Elk and your input here matters a lot. 🙏

Feel free to elaborate on the comments as well!

#askmastodon #askfedi #askmasto #fediverse #mastodon #mastodev

This Marxist lens on the different ways my peers and network are reacting to GenAI was more interesting than I expected

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/craft-alienation-llm/

LLMコーディングアシスタントはソフトウェアエンジニアたちの亀裂を作ったのではない。すでにあった亀裂を露わにしただけだ。

匠人気質のソフトウェアエンジニアたちが感じる疎外の源泉はLLMではなく、産出物を遅く出す側に不利益を与える市場にある。Marxの労働疎外論でこの問題を読む新しいエッセイを書いた。

「コーディングを愛する人たちが、なぜコーディングから追い出されているのか」

LLM 코딩 어시스턴트는 소프트웨어 엔지니어들 사이의 分裂(분열)을 만든 게 아니다. 이미 있던 分裂(분열)을 드러낸 것이다.

匠人(장인) 氣質(기질)의 소프트웨어 엔지니어들이 느끼는 疎外(소외)의 源泉(원천)은 LLM이 아니다. 그들의 產出物(산출물)을 더 느리게 만드는 쪽에 不利益(불이익)을 주는 市場(시장)이다. Marx의 勞動(노동) 疎外論(소외론)으로 이 問題(문제)를 읽어보는 새 글을 썼다.

〈왜 코딩을 사랑하는 사람들이 코딩에서 밀려나는가〉 (한글)

@evan Totally agree, and I think that's actually the point the essay is trying to make. The split isn't “LLM users vs. craft lovers” but something more like “people with room to choose how they use the tools vs. people who don't have that room.”

@mitchellh is a good example. He's clearly using LLMs as a craftsperson. So am I, I think. But both of us are in situations where we're not being measured against a colleague's output every quarter. The workplace dynamic is what compresses all of that curiosity and exploration into pure throughput.

The craft probably does survive, just not evenly distributed.

As luck would have it, the timing didn't work your way. A re-post hit the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473178

This is a damn good article, and really makes me think about where I fall on the spectrum.

I didn't have to think very hard, I side firmly with Lawson.

I firmly believe that code is a craft, and I take pride in the time spent writing the code, not just in the product itself.

I mourn the impending loss of that kind of counter-culture approach to programming. Which is ironic because I don't think it's even the mainstream way of looking at coding... most devs I know would side with Orchard. Coding is a means to an end.

Work of the day! Me and my colleague have been making something with fabric and electronics :>