https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080
"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.
When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."
Your work is influenced by the medium by which you work. I used to be able to tell very quickly if a website was developed in Ruby on Rails, because some approaches to solve a problem are easy and some contain dragons.
If you are coding in clay, the problem is getting turned into a problem solvable in clay.
The challenge if you are directing others (people or agents) to do the work is that you don't know if they are taking into account the properties of the clay. That may be the difference between clean code - and something which barely works and is unmaintainable.
I'd say in both cases of delegation, you are responsible for making sure the work is done correctly. And, in both cases, if you do not have personal experiences in the medium you may not be prepared to judge the work.