Let’s use this topic to figure out what Humancrafted should be as a community. Stuff like:
Any and all feedback about how to get this space going in the early days would be so appreciated and welcome.
I set up a simple webpage at https://humancrafted.dev/ that basically just points to this forum ( Humancrafted redirects here and is a handy link) (source code: brettchalupa/humancrafted.dev: Static website for Humancrafted - Codeberg.org)
Discourse has pretty generous free hosting, but one downside is no custom domain. I figure, well, let’s get this established and see how it goes and then if we need to invest in our own hosting with a custom domain, we can do that.
I was thinking that it could be fun to expand the site a bit more to include resources and further expand on this concept of “humancrafted software.” The idea for the website, in particular, would be a concise place to point people who want to learn about why using AI for coding is bad. Something like that! Not sure much beyond that. It’d also point to this here forum. https://handcraftedcode.org/ is a big inspiration (and in many ways, a companion to this Humancrafted stuff).
I was also thinking that Humancrafted could have some additional components to the website and this forum: maybe an interview show/podcast talking with people making software without AI + maybe some sort of book? I’ve got an outline for a book about all of this stuff! And a lot I want to say.
But I figure the best place to start is with the community and see where it all goes. 
Discourse, the forum software, is flagging most new posts as spam. Very strange! Working on trying to configure it to not do that. Apologies if it happens to anyone new.
I shared the forum on Mastodon, so it seems like maybe things might pick up a little bit. Feeling good about this!
Some suggestions based on what I’ve seen in another communities i’m part of that have proven to be popular:
Categories / Subcategories
Human-crafted - a dedicated category for human crafted software development with recurring topics to share links to dev logs, projects or writing about human-crafted development (Basically an equivalent to the 32-bit cafe indie web community Webweaving category which has popular recurring topics for ‘What did you do on your website today?’ and ‘[month] - share your blog posts’)
Programming - may be useful to have a dedicated category given the likely broad range of experience in the forum so people have a place to explore language specifics and tooling setups.
Community events - if the community grows to host virtual or in-person meet-ups, jams, coding challenges etc. Could include or be distinct from a place to signpost events outside the community that people may find relevant.
Community projects - a space for members to post about opportunities to collaborate on community initiatives.
Community-wiki - a space for topics that can be maintained by multiple members (once they reach a particular trust level) such as recommended resources. Examples probably include:
Interviews/Podcasts/Articles/Videos - needs a better name but basically a space to link to Human-crafted branded content that would give people a space for discussion. Saw similar on the (now shuttered) Westenberg discourse forum where each Westenberg article has a dedicated topic and it led to lots of interesting discussions.
Book updates - if a book gets going, a space to share updates or links to chapter previews etc
Topics
That’s all I can think of at the moment. It’s probably better to take a ‘less is more’ approach to begin with and see where the need for more categories arises.
I love all of these ideas! Thanks so much for the thoughtful sharing. I can totally imagine how we could grow into a lot of those ideas. I’ll start a TIL thread once I learn something TIL-y soon.
A few more ideas that came to mind over the weekend:
I wouldn’t want to do this all the time but maybe in the summer it could be fun to all checkout Elixir or Gleam whatever togetherWithout knowing exactly what categories everything should be placed in, I think AI affects devs differently based on why they code.
For founders, if the “barriers to entry” for creating SAAS products are lower, then the market will be even more flooded with SAAS apps.
For anyone creating a website, for commercial or other reasons, search traffic is lower now due to AI overviews.
For freelancers, the bad clients saying “my nephew could code this” are emboldened now. More freelancers will enter the market and the jobs that are left will involve more “slop clearance” from normies thinking that they could do it themselves on Lovable, before getting out of their depth and hiring someone to fix the mess.
For those employed as devs, AI usage mandates and elevated expectations from managers could turn them into “reverse centaurs” (to use Cory Doctorow’s term).
For software creatives, I’ve noticed that any ambitious looking new project that appears on HackerNews is assumed to be slop until proven otherwise. Before AI, they would ask “what is the use case for this?” or “why does it work this way?” etc. Now they look at your docs and scan them for “its not X, its Y” etc.
Ryan on Mastodon asked a question about the forum software currently powering this site that I want to bring up in this topic:
The post says:
hosted on a service [Discourse] that uses AI and offers an AI product?
I turned off the Discourse AI features when I set up this forum. And the fact that the hosting is free and the software is open source is appealing. I don’t have the money right now to pay for hosting the forum in perpetuity (but maybe there’s some way we could crowd-funding it or some other option!).
But what Ryan says is true, Discourse has AI features and is seemingly developed with AI too from looking at the discourse/AI-AGENTS.md at 3b6713ef7768d10cee4f11d033e37f66a1ccad5c · discourse/discourse · GitHub present in the sourcetree.
What do others think about this? Is it a problem such that we should evaluate alternatives/migrating away from Discourse? What alternatives exist that are robust, mature, easy to host, and reasonable in terms of cost to host?
I was wondering if we could do a category for “Industry/Job” support. I believe there will be a lot of people trying to share their wins for cutting LLM usage, tips on tough situations, sharing stories burnout, etc…
I would look at it skeptically. Let the community build up and then once you really feel like you have something going switch to an alternative that is LLM free. I wouldn’t want you to start spending money on something that may not go anywhere if that makes sense. Though looks like more and more are joining. I just joined and I am seeing intro posts after mine. It’s still good to look for alternatives now, but try not to jump the gun just yet if that makes sense.
Unfortunately I don’t really know of any good alternatives though.
I love this idea! I’ll set one up tomorrow and recategorize our one topic that falls into it already. 
Agree with you, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ll be curious to see how it develops and if the community remains active for weeks and months to come. That’s been my primary concern: how to keep it active. It’ll be a learning experience for sure! But like you said, some positive early signals.