The Butter-Churning Coefficient of Software Engineering

I'm making a prediction right now, and you can take it straight to the bank: putting the Craft Coder title on your resume within the next five years is going to be an instant-reject at any company that actually generates revenue. It is the modern equivalent of boasting that you work well with FrontPage, an absolute scarlet letter screaming to hiring managers that you fundamentally misunderstand what our job actually is and that you actively resent the tools required to do it at scale.

Picture a tavern in 1832.

It is dimly lit, smelling aggressively of damp wool, pipe smoke, and spilled ale, and crowded with elite, soot-stained wheelwrights weeping openly into their grog because some absolute chump down the road just bought a steam engine. These guys are the spiritual ancestors of today's programmers, the original secret oath-bound organization of English textile workers, nursing a massive, collective grievance because the highly romanticized artisanal purity of transit is being ruined by unfeeling machines that don't even know how to properly shave an ash-wood spoke. They sit there in the dark, furiously polishing their hand-planes, absolutely convinced that the broader market will eventually realize these soulless, mechanized looms are a passing fad, and that the world will inevitably come crawling back to the noble, calloused craftsmen who understand the true texture of the wood.

Newsflash.

Instead of crawling back to the artisans, the market gleefully purchased the cheap mechanized shirts and starved the wheelwrights out of existence.

I know exactly how seductive this psychological trap is, because I almost fell into it headfirst back in the early 2000s. I was having beers with a grizzled, chain-smoking tech lead—the kind of guy who actually cared about shipping software—and he was venting to me about this utterly cursed backend system his team was managing, a monstrous, sprawling chimera of C++ and early Java. He was absolutely furious about a junior dev on his team. Let's call him Gus. Gus was thoroughly convinced that he was a genuine artisan of the bit-stream. According to the tech lead, Gus had flat-out refused to use standard libraries and spent three consecutive weeks meticulously hand-rolling his own custom doubly-linked lists and brittle XML parsers from scratch because he supposedly didn't trust the alleged bloat of off-the-shelf components.

It was a completely pointless exercise that nobody asked for, nobody needed, and which ultimately just introduced a dozen new race conditions into a batch job that ran once a night. But Gus was incredibly proud of himself. He was strutting around the office like he was the reincarnation of John von Neumann.

The tech lead told me how he finally yanked Gus into a code review and absolutely dismantled his delusion. He pointed at the artisanal, hand-crafted parser and aggressively demanded to know why Gus had just wasted an entire month building a buggy, inferior version of a library they could download for free, all while the actual customer login page was throwing 500 errors and losing the company money.

Here is the truly embarrassing part, the part that proves how profoundly and painfully oblivious I actually was back then: as the tech lead was telling me this story, I secretly agreed with Gus. I sat there nursing my drink, silently defending the butter churn, thinking that standard libraries genuinely were for hacks. It took me years of reading post-mortems and watching companies fail to realize how completely stupid my mindset was. The entire pathetic charade of so-called craft is just an elaborate coping mechanism to stroke an engineer's ego and avoid doing actual, difficult product work.

Snap back to the present. I was reading the original craft coding manifesto yesterday over a beer, and my immediate reaction was just this profound, sinking sense of historical déjà vu, a chilling realization that we are watching the exact same wheelwrights cry into their grog all over again. I am looking at these manifesto docs, and it is just this colossal mountain of wank pretending to be profound, asserting that if you let an LLM emit your postorder traversal of the AST, you are somehow inherently producing dog poop. What we are witnessing here is a severe, terminal case of Abstraction Denial Syndrome (ADS). ADS is a fear-based religious coping mechanism designed entirely for insecure engineers who are absolutely terrified that their entire professional self-worth is fundamentally tethered to manual syntax memorization.

When you boil away the self-righteousness, Abstraction Denial Syndrome is just the Butter-Churning Coefficient in action.

(Imagine a hastily drawn, MS-Paint style line graph here showing The Butter-Churning Coefficient. The Y-axis represents Smugness and the X-axis represents Time wasted writing boilerplate instead of shipping.)

The Butter-Churning Coefficient dictates that an engineer's arrogance increases in direct, exponential proportion to the actual business value they fail to produce, peaking exactly when they are hand-typing repetitive boilerplate that a mechanized churn could have blasted out in three seconds. They want to force everyone to keep hand-churning the butter because they are secretly paralyzed by the thought of stepping back and actually managing the dairy farm. It is fundamentally terrifying to move up the abstraction stack, because up there, you actually have to solve hard business problems instead of just arguing about whether or not to use trailing commas.

If you review the industry literature from thirty years ago, you realize legacy engineers have been running this exact same script, verbatim, just ported to whichever decade they happen to be losing their minds in. I remember having utterly exhausting conversations with 1990s C and C++ assembly zealots who would literally turn purple screaming about Java's garbage collection, treating manual memory allocation as a sacred sacrament that must never be defiled by automation. You know the exact type I am talking about. The Real Programmers who believed with every fiber of their being that if you don't manage your own mallocs, if you aren't manually tracking every stray byte of memory, manually dereferencing vtables, and watching your pointer arithmetic like a paranoid, hyper-caffeinated medieval bookkeeper, you don't truly understand the machine and you have no business writing software.

They viewed garbage collection as an existential threat to their purity, spinning out these massive, breathless, comma-spliced tirades about how abstraction layers were breeding a generation of weak-minded, drooling novices who couldn't balance a pointer to save their lives. They genuinely believed that if you didn't manually traverse your own DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) and free every node with your own two hands, you would inevitably crash the global economy the second a memory leak slipped past the JVM.

Yup.

Look at how that turned out. The industry didn't care about their artisanal manual mallocs because the industry just wanted the damn butter. Now, the modern anti-LLM crafters are trotting out the exact same religious dogma, just replacing garbage collection with Copilot, desperately trying to convince us that manually banging out CRUD boilerplate is a high intellectual art form that machines can never replicate.

And of course, because nobody wants to admit out loud that they are just a terrified wheelwright afraid of the steam engine, they invent secondary, morally unassailable defenses to shield their Abstraction Denial Syndrome from critique.

(If I were to draw a flowchart titled Do I Actually Need to Type This?, it would just lead to a massive box saying NO, THE ROBOT CAN DO IT, GO THINK ABOUT ARCHITECTURE.)

The funniest defensive posture by far is the sudden, bleeding-heart environmentalism. I saw a whitepaper where a craft-coder claimed they were righteously rejecting AI solely because the compute power is boiling the oceans, which is just staggering given the environmental argument falls apart against the water footprint of coffee. You have these insufferable guys downing six artisanal pour-overs a day, each single cup requiring roughly 140 liters of agricultural water to produce the beans, sitting in their air-conditioned glass offices running continuous integration pipelines on every trivial whitespace commit, and then they have the unmitigated gall to look down their noses at a three-second LLM query because they read a blog post saying GPUs are thirsty.

Ouch.

It is a pathetic dodge. They are hiding their profound, existential terror of professional irrelevance behind a fake tree.

Let's follow the Butter-Churning Coefficient to its logical, catastrophic extreme over the next half-decade. Executive management rarely bothers to dramatically fire these guys in a blaze of glory; the inevitable corporate response is to gently and quietly relocate them to a specialized Tech-Zoo.

Picture a literal historical reenactment society for software development.

In five years, you will be able to buy a ticket, walk into a fenced-off corporate preserve, and watch a perfectly preserved specimen of a 2024 Craft Coder wearing suspenders and drinking a hazy IPA while manually implementing Hindley-Milner type inference algorithms by hand. You'll wander past the Artisanal Makefile enclosure, where a guy with a severe astigmatism is manually managing dependencies for a C project that hasn't been updated since 2017. Next door, in the Pure Vim habitat, you can watch a senior engineer write a 400-line regex to refactor a class name because using an automated AST-aware refactoring tool feels like cheating to him.

Tourists will point and take flash photographs while these guys meticulously debate the syntactic purity of their variable declarations, completely insulated from the actual market where the rest of the industry is shipping automated, hyper-scalable products and absolutely yeeting these crap-ass legacy codebases into the sun. They will live in a perfectly enclosed ecosystem of Abstraction Denial Syndrome, happily churning away while the steam engines power the rest of the planet.

Look, I am just a guy analyzing the wreckage from the sidelines, and I fully admit I am entirely capable of being staggeringly ignorant about plenty of modern frameworks. I have read enough post-mortems to know how little I actually know. But I know a religious coping mechanism when I see one. Engineering has always been, from the very first punch card to the latest neural net, about ruthlessly climbing the abstraction stack. Period. Every single tool we have ever invented is designed to abstract away the lower-level mechanics so we can think about harder, bigger, more complex architectural problems without our brains exploding.

You either learn to direct the steam engine, or you become part of the museum exhibit.

Stop treating your IDE like a butter churn.

So go ahead, knit your own ASTs by hand, keep your little artisanal type-system pure, and enjoy churning butter. I'm sure someone at the historical society will pay you in exposure. Let the flames begin, etc. Yawn.