What is craft?

What is “craft?” What does it mean as a designer or developer, or woodworker, or doctor, to have a high level of craft in one’s work?

I don’t think it’s “deliver pixel-perfect designs.” It’s not to “develop the most elegant expression of a algorithm.”

I think craft is intent, skill, and taste, applied together in context.

Intent because craft requires one to be thoughtful and act with purpose in what they do.

Skill because craft requires one to apply a body of expertise accumulated over time to what they do.

Taste because craft requires one to be able to evaluate what they do.

And context because the constraints created by a given context influence how all three of intent, skill, and taste are applied together.

High-craft product design might result in super sketchy, loose wireframes. Or it might result in absolutely perfect, pixel-perfect, high-fidelity visual design and animations in a deeply annotated design artifact. What makes either outcome high-craft depends on the context in which the work is being done, that there was intent behind it being done that way, that the outcomes were informed by one’s skills that were a match for the problem, and that taste was applied in evaluating the outcome.

What’s vibe coding in relation to “craft?” I don’t think that it’s inherently high– or low-craft.

If a UI meant for a large audience with diverse accessibility needs is created by vibe coding and launching a messy codebase, which doesn’t implement accessibility, that’s probably low-craft, because regardless of the intent, skill, and taste, it’s mismatched to the context of the work. The same UI for a prototype or personal project could well be high-craft, because that’s a totally different context. The process of iterating from that prototype to the shipped solution may be high-craft end-to-end with wildly different outcomes and expectations at each step, so long as intent, skill, and taste are applied within the context of each step.