[kjksf]

Do you disagree with his analogy?

Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially.

100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI.

The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so they were killed in mass market pottery products and had to find a tiny niche. Before industrialization handmade pottery was mass market pottery. It was outcompeted in mass market and had to move into a niche.

And that part of doesn't even translate into code. People are not buying lines of code, so you're not going to be buying handmade code.

Handmade pottery can offer variety (designs) not available in mass produced pottery. When you look at software, you can't tell if it was 100% handwritten or written with assistance of AI.

[kranner]

If the argument was about cost per unit output, bringing in Etsy didn't make sense at all, especially when they explicitly mention it was about valuing different things.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.

[csomar]

This is interesting because the cost of cloning code is zero. The human written code could be cheaper than the AI one because of the cost of distribution. The same does not apply for pottery because to create/distribute an extra bowl, you need >0 resources.

My point is (and the issue I have with the article) is that the quality of code (whatever that means) is not measured by the number of lines. Whether the code is generated by AI or humans, the market is not going to care. Same where it didn't care whether it was written by someone in Silicon Valley or in the middle of East Asia.