Casey Muratori said two opposite things on two consecutive days. And I can’t stop thinking about it.

On Saturday, in Bullish or Bearish on AI Coding Assistants? “No.”, he flatly refused AI coding assistants. His reasoning: “The thing I like about programming is me figuring out a new way to do something. I need to be there doing it myself.” Skip the creative problem-solving and you train yourself out of relevance. No middle ground.

On Sunday, in The New Most Valuable Programming Job: AI Babysitter, he predicted the most valuable programmer of the future is someone who doesn’t care about writing code. The “AI babysitter” — deep technical knowledge, no emotional attachment to the craft. Those people won’t burn out because they were never in love with the part that’s disappearing. People like Casey? “Probably out.”

Both clips surfaced via A Life Engineered on YouTube.

This matters because of who’s saying it. Casey built Bink Video — the codec used in over 15,000 games. He worked on The Witness. He spent 660+ episodes of Handmade Hero teaching people to write games from scratch, no engines, no shortcuts. This is someone who has spent his entire career arguing that understanding every layer of the code matters.

And now he’s holding both ends of the rope. The craft is the point — and the market is about to stop paying for it.

Where I fitLink to heading

I wrote a few days ago about sitting with a question I can’t answer: where do I fit in this? Casey’s two-day arc maps almost perfectly onto that post — my “where the hope is” section vs. my “where the doubt creeps in” section. He just said both parts out loud.

But here’s where I break from his framing. Casey draws a binary. I don’t land on either side.

	Casey (Saturday)	Casey (Sunday)	Where I land
Core belief	The craft is the point	The craft is a liability	The craft serves the outcome
AI stance	Refuses it — skip the creative work and you lose relevance	Predicts it wins — babysitters replace builders	Uses it to ship faster
Who thrives	Those who own every layer	Those with skills but no attachment	Those who care about the thing working
What’s at risk	Irrelevance if AI catches up	Burnout if you loved the old job too much	Still figuring that out

I like the craft. I like reasoning through a problem, shaping the solution, seeing the code take form. But that’s not the only part I like. I also like seeing it work. The thing running. The user hitting the page. The deploy going green. The moment where it stops being code and starts being a product.

The shipping is the bigger reward for me. Always has been. The craft was always in service of that.

Why that gives me hopeLink to heading

If the attachment is to the outcome — not just the process — then the shift Casey describes doesn’t take everything away. It changes how I get there. I orchestrate instead of hand-write. I review instead of draft. The role changes, but the thing that motivates me survives.

The people Casey says are “probably out” are the ones whose entire identity lives in the writing. Remove that and there’s nothing left to care about. But if part of your identity lives in the working — in the thing existing, being used, doing its job — then you’ve got something the transition doesn’t touch.

What I’m still not sure aboutLink to heading

I don’t want to oversell the comfort here. The craft does matter to me. Letting go of more of it every month carries a cost. Some days I miss the version of the work where I wrote every line and knew every corner of the codebase.

And Casey’s bigger point still stands: if AI eventually handles the judgment too — the deciding, the reviewing, the “no, not that” — then even the babysitter role has an expiration date.

I don’t know when that is. Neither does Casey. He just said it out loud, which is more than most people are willing to do.

I’m still building. I’m still writing about it. And I’m watching one of the most craft-obsessed programmers alive wrestle with the same question I am — which tells me the question is real, even if the answer isn’t here yet.