The Art of “Real Programming”: Why Tools Aren’t Engineering

In the modern software industry, there is a growing, dangerous belief: that programming is a “boring detail.” The narrative suggests that anyone can become an “engineer” in a few months, or better yet, bypass the craft entirely by using AI to “glue” components together. This is nonsense. The need for foundational programming is still here, and it remains extremely complex—in fact, it is getting more complex every year.

Let me clarify here that by no means I want to diminish the value of the tools and AI which I find extremely useful and use them all the time. But it is crucial to recognize that tools are just that—tools. They are not a replacement for the deep understanding of programming principles, software design, and system architecture that real engineering requires.

Abstractions are useful, but they are not a substitute for foundational
knowledge. We must stop confusing “tool proficiency” with “software
engineering.”

The Abstraction Trap

Modern libraries and frameworks are like LEGO blocks. They allow you to assemble impressive structures without understanding what is happening under the hood. While useful for prototypes, this approach is insufficient for building robust, high-performance systems.

If you doubt this, ask the “rock star engineer” on your team to build a parallelization algorithm for CUDA, a Linux kernel extension, or a high-performance GPU device driver.

The “Rockstar” who excels at assembling third-party APIs will be completely lost. They have convinced themselves that programming is just about using tools, not about understanding the science. They view performance optimization, memory management, concurrency, and hardware architecture as mere “details” to be handled by a framework.

Power Users vs. Engineers

Most modern “Full Stack” developers are actually high-level power users. They are the spiritual successors to the “power users” of Excel, VBA, and WordPress. While their knowledge of platform tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform is useful, it is not a substitute for understanding the underlying principles of software design.

There is a fundamental difference between using a tool and understanding the art of programming:

The Bottom Line

Real programming is still needed, but it is being buried by an inflation of generalists who have abstracted themselves away from the hardware. We are producing a generation of developers who can build with tools, but cannot build the tools themselves.