> Sometimes you want a utilitarian teapot to reliably pour a cup of tea.

If you pardon the analogy, watch how Japanese make a utilitarian teapot which reliably pours a cup of tea.

It's more complicated and skill-intensive than it looks.

In both realms, making an artistic vase can be simpler than a simple utilitarian tool.

AI is good at making (poor quality, arguably) artistic vases via its stochastic output, not highly refined, reliable tools. Tolerances on these are tighter.

There is a whole range of variants in between those two "artistic vs utilitarian" points. Additionally, there is a ton of variance around "artistic" vs "utilitarian".

Artisans in Japan might go to incredible lengths to create utilitarian teapots. Artisans who graduated last week from a 4-week pottery workshop will produce a different kind quality, albeit artisan. $5.00 teapots from an East Asian mass production factory will be very different than high quality mass-produced upmarket teapots at a higher price. I have things in my house that fall into each of those categories (not all teapots, but different kinds of wares).

Sometimes commercial manufacturing produces worse tolerances than hand-crafting. Sometimes, commercial manufacturing is the only way to get humanly unachievable tolerances.

You can't simplify it into "always" and "never" absolutes. Artisan is not always nicer than commercial. Commercial is not always cheaper than artisan. _____ is not always _____ than ____.

If we bring it back to AI, I've seen it produce crap, and I've also seen it produce code that honestly impressed me (my opinion is based on 24 years of coding and engineering management experience). I am reluctant to make a call where it falls on that axis that we've sketched out in this message thread.