Industrialization took things to another lever. Mastery meant skill in using ever more complicated and industrialized machinery. Profit seeking behavior set the focus on automation, repeatability and perhaps most important reducing the skill necessary to do the job.

Today nearly all furniture is made in factories using not wood but rather sawdust and wood particles glued and pressed together. The process is deskilled, if anything the skilled work is in designing, manufacturing and tuning the machines that make the furniture, not in making furniture itself.

We still teach woodworking in schools, oddly enough though we typically teach it through the lens of using modern machinery when in my opinion when should teach it as art form using traditional hand tools as that type of work is safer, less noisy, cheaper, requires less safe and most important me doesn't have you breathing in airborne particles of sawdust.

This is more of a realization and perhaps a question for you the reader but with the age of AI upon us, will coding go the way of wood working. Will the number of coders become less and less? Will it become deskilled? Will a good coder simply become someone proficient in the use of AI tools? It would seem we're at the dawn of the industrial revolution where the nature of wood working probably started to change.

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I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?