The Barefoot Engineer

Recently, a colleague mentioned with pride that he’d shipped a large feature without using LLMs. My initial reaction was that writing code without LLMs is like running a 5K barefoot. Sure, it’s doable. But why make it harder than it has to be? Still, I’m curious about the source of that pride. Was it fear of obsolescence? Or something deeper about identity and craft? After all, this same colleague relies on AI tools for other tasks.