> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.

A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe).

Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

You took this statistic out of your rear end?

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

This is a provably false statement, given that eg. Handmade Hero exists and sold a bunch of pre-orders despite never coming close to completion, and spawned an entire community that prides themselves on handmade software. There are also content creators like Tsoding who make a living by having people watch them do handmade coding for the love of the craft.

Some non-zero percentage of people will also always be willing to pay a premium for superior-quality software. The author's thesis isn't that LLMs can produce S-grade software but that 'nobody cares' about quality and that C-grade software is good enough. While it's true that software quality isn't greatly valued at scale, I think the minority who care is larger than the minority who care about premium woodworking goods, particularly because as an artisan software developer you more or less have access to the global market of every single person who cares, while as an artisan woodworker you mostly only have access to the market of people in your town who care.

This also overlooks that LLMs are politically divisive and there are movements to boycott them and shame people for using them. There's a niche for organic, free-range, vegan, etc. products at the supermarket for conscientious objectors, there will undoubtedly be such a niche for software. All the more so if LLMs reach a point where they actually are putting everyone out of a job, they will get much more divisive. There was already an assassination attempt against Altman and his promises to destroy everyone's livelihood haven't even come to fruition.

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.