It's less about productivity and output (those are still desired in many art fields) but more about creativity and personality, more humane traits.

Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years. Their relationship with code has changed.

You can look at a comic and immediately identify the illustrator if you're well versed in the artists. Now would that still happen in 20 years if Gen AI became standard today? Will we keep getting new artists and new art styles? Or will their relationship with art become more like newer coders have with code?

I don't think it's an easy question to answer and no one likely has an answer.

>Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years.

I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.

There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.

I can listen to music and recognize the artist or a singer’s voice. It doesn’t mean as much without that relationship. Depending on the style of music some of the charm is in production imperfections or sloppy playing that brings a distinctly human quality to it.