I wonder if there are parallels to be drawn here against the industrialization of other, physical, goods, and how their production evolved over time. If you look at something like, say, printing (I'll use the example of woodblock printing here, since I know a decent amount about it), it originated very much as a craft and discipline, as a means to fulfill a particular function. As printing technology improved and became better industrialized, the craft of printing was gradually replaced with other means that fulfilled the same function, but possessed a different form. i.e., lacking those characteristics of products of craft that we find desirable; artless.<p>We've been able to fulfill the function of printing very cheaply for what seems like ages now, and we've reached a point where some niche and particularly attuned segment of the population wants a bit more out of the actual form of the printed product, the depth of form that was once common. There is a growing community of people that deeply care about woodblock prints now, favoring their physical characteristics, despite such prints falling out of fashion for a period of time during the heights of industrialization. This group of people understands the value of such craft, and is willing to spend more for it, since the difference in the form of the end product from mass-produced stuff is so stark.<p>The key thing here, and with other categories of physical goods (e.g. pottery, glassware, furniture, etc.), is that there's an obvious and tangible difference in the form of products produced via traditional means, and those mass manufactured, despite them serving fundamentally the same function.<p>With software however, I worry that this isn't the case, and the sort of resurgence of interest we see now in products produced by traditional means won't ever translate, assuming that we do move in the direction of more and more software engineering being "automated" by AI assistance. To an end-user of a piece of software, I imagine that there will be very little visible difference in the observable characteristics between fully hand-written and AI-produced software. Indeed, given the same requirements, there ought not be a difference between these two things. It's exactly this delta, however, which drives the passionate and less cost-sensitive enthusiasts to prefer handmade physical goods over manufactured ones. If both the form and the function of AI-produced software is identical to those of traditional software, but the AI-produced software is cheaper, why would anyone go with the traditional stuff? I understand that there are other factors at play here as well (e.g., particularly principled consumers etc.) but really, some combination of form, function, and cost seem like the biggest levers to me, and they seem on the face of it to be pulled toward the direction of AI, for better or worse.