Good Coding is All in the Details
I was talking to a friend that was 'thinking out-loud' about starting an Open Source project for a web service that he wanted to build in Erlang. It sounds nice, but as I'm not really the most knowledgeable person about the subject matter, I'm really more of an interested observer than an active participant, but we've been friends for a lot of years, and so I wanted to listen about this idea of his.
He got around to the fact that he was also working though this issue with XML files (totally unrelated, which is the way a lot of our conversations are) and the fact that the people that created these XML files had their own XML parser that didn't adhere to the XML standard, and so all the XML code they generated wasn't standard and he had to write a job to clean it all up t then use it. "It's all about details!" he said, and I could not agree more.
Development is about details. Anyone can sit and say "I want this page/view to have this, and that, and this, and I want it to look like this, with bold here, and a pick-list there..." but it's making it work that's the tough part. Even with code generators these days, it's the details they leave out that matter most. If you really want to make a sustainable, maintainable, robust application, then it's going to require that someone get involved in the details. There's no other way to do it.
If you think you can be a developer and not pay attention to the details, then my suggestion is to get another job. You're not in the right line of work. You might as well be a surgeon that can't stand to see blood. It's that much a part of the job. Unfortunately, as my friend and I spoke, I realized that we both know of a lot of 'developers' that don't have any attention to detail. I hear it every day. It's a sad statement on the craft of development that there's no easy way to tell a developer who has attention to detail from one that does not. They both look the same.