Mastery is a Wicked Problem

I was rummaging through my posts the other day and re-read On Reaching Mastery. In 2016, I wrote that the barrier to entry is very low, the barrier to succeed very high when you want to put apps into the iOS App Store. Ten years later, and – oh boy. In 2025, a meager year ago, there was one voice that asked: if the AI coding tools are so great, Where’s the Shovelware? I remember bookmarking this. It was very convincing. I now think they better shouldn’t have posed the challenge! Who on earth wants more shovelware? Yet that’s what we get. I spent that year experimenting with AI coding tools, too; for the first time even. I skipped all previous generations, from online chat to Cursor. I noticed how in meetups the topics shifted from TDD and quirky dev tools to AI tools from late 2024 through 2025 and into 2026, where Agentic Engineering was almost the norm in the local software craftsmanship meetup in particular. It’s curious how software craftsmanship in particular adopted automating…