Someone made a comment the other day about how silly it would be for people to continue using hand tools when the electric motor was invented.

This felt very out of touch for the reason you brought forth: hand-crafted products very often become more valuable in an industry where production is done at-scale. (Provided the hand-crafted product is of high quality.)

We’ve discovered a way to take what someone asks for and generate a lot of relevant code at a significantly lower cost than what it would take to contract out. Maybe for small requests this could be fine for users in the future, but inevitably people will prefer carefully-crafted codebases that provide robust experiences or high reliability.

Note that "hand-crafted" furniture is usually still built using power tools: electric planers, electric saws, routers etc.

The real difference is that a carpenter actually talks to you when you order your furniture, and builds something custom to your specification. The quality of the finished cupboard wouldn't improve if your craftsman only used hand tools.

I suspect something similar will happen for software: For some applications, vibe code is good enough. For others, a human will do software design (possibly with machine assistance), hand-writes some parts, delegates other parts to an AI but still reads it.

Purely-human-written code will be akin to furniture built using only hand tools: a piece of art, or maybe product of a hobby or a religious ceremony rather than a practical necessity or a practical advantage.