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askmiketoday at 2:20 AM0 repliesview on HN

There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.

If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.

Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.

Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).

This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.