I wish it was true, but it sounds like copium. I bet garment makers, or artisan woodworkers said the same when big store cheap retails came. I bet they said "people value quality and etc", but in the end, outside of a group of people who has principles, everyone else floods their home with H&Ms and crap from Temu.

So yeah, good code might win among small group of principled people, but the majority will not care. And more importantly, management won't care. And as long as management don't care, you have two choices: "embrace" slop, or risk staying jobless in a though market.

Edit: Also, good code = expensive code. In an economy where people struggle to afford a living, nobody is going to pay for good code when they can get "good enough" code for 200$ a month with Claude.

Handcrafted furniture costs a lot more money than mass produced furniture.

Software, on the other hand, can be free. Even before LLMs I would argue the best code was found in FOSS projects.

Nobody is going to use sloppy buggy software if a handcrafted well engineered alternative exists, and is free.

In the case of software, the group of people who have principles might be the ones funding FOSS projects, and the software itself would then be enjoyed by all. This is more or less what's already happening today.

Artisanal crafts are alive and well. It turns out that some people actually prefer handmade stuff to the mass-produced kind, and there's plenty enough of them for a viable market, at least for the highest-quality producers. The real losers are those who make stuff of only barely-acceptable quality: they have no edge over what's mass produced, their middling skills lose value and they're forced to exit the sector.

For a lot of companies their entire income entirely depends on their uptime.

Might be fine if your HR software isn't approving holiday requests, but your checkout breaks, there's no human that can pick apart the mess and you lose your entire income for a week and that might be the end of the business.