Richard Cocks

The Flatpack Fallacy

I think I finally understand the visceral resistance some developers have to AI-assisted coding.

When you tell a craftsman that a machine can replicate their work, you're not just challenging their skills—you're offending their sense of taste. They've spent years honing their judgment, developing an intuition for elegant solutions, learning to see the difference between code that merely works and code that sings. And now here you are, suggesting that your AI-assisted output belongs in the same conversation as theirs.

There's an analogy here. With the help of machines, prefabrication, and a global distribution network, I can build myself a bookcase. A carpenter would rightly point out that I didn't really build anything. I didn't select the wood, didn't saw or plane it, didn't cut the joints. I just followed a wordless nineteen-step guide and a bookcase emerged.

And the carpenter is correct. In any meaningful craft sense, I didn't build that bookcase.

But here's what the carpenter misses: without that flatpack, I wouldn't have a bookcase at all. The alternative was never me commissioning a hand-crafted piece of bespoke furniture. The alternative was bare floor and books in piles.

The debate around AI coding is haunted by this same false choice. Critics frame it as "AI slop" versus "properly crafted software," as though every line of AI-assisted code is displacing something beautiful that a skilled engineer would otherwise have written.

But that's not the counterfactual. Most AI-assisted code isn't replacing carefully architected systems. It's enabling things that simply wouldn't exist: the small business owner automating a workflow, the hobbyist building a tool for their community, the solo developer finally shipping the side project that's been stuck in their head for years.

The carpenter's flatpack objection is really about status and identity, not about whether the bookcase holds books. The interesting question isn't whether AI-assisted code meets some artisanal standard. It's whether it creates value that wouldn't otherwise exist.

For a lot of us, the answer is yes. And that bookcase holds books just fine.