I bought a pair of leather shoes recently. Nothing experimental, nothing trendy. Just beautifully made.
What caught me was not the brand or the price. It was the restraint. The stitching, the finish, the choices somebody had clearly made about what mattered and what did not. That is not a template being filled in.
The moment stayed with me longer than I expected, because of what I had been reading all week at work. AI generated code. Lots of it. Code that worked and still felt heavy.
Factories are not the enemy
We already understand this in the physical world. Handmade shoes and hand sewn garments still command a premium in a market full of cheaper alternatives. That is not nostalgia and it is not a complaint about automation.
Factories are remarkable. Scale, consistency, access. All of it real.
But a factory optimises for volume. Craft optimises for judgement.
AI is the factory
It is extraordinarily good at producing output. Text, code, ideas, structure. It does not get tired. It does not hesitate.
It also does not possess tasteTaste is knowing what to leave out. Machines only know what to put in. . It cannot tell when something is already enough. It never feels the weight of unnecessary complexity, because complexity costs it nothing.
I have walked into codebases where the machine plainly did most of the writing. Everything works. The system is bloated. Layer on layer, abstractions nobody needed, functions that say a great deal and mean very little. It reads like a transcript of every possible thought rather than a set of decisions.
The problem is not that AI wrote the code. The problem is that nobody edited itThe edit is the craft. It always was. .
Removal is the craft
In craftsmanship, taking away matters as much as putting in. A tailor cuts fabric off. A shoemaker knows which stitch is unnecessary. The value sits in deciding what should not exist.
That decision is the engineer's, and it does not delegate.
Ask AI to work out what you want and it will hand you something generic. Ask it to execute something you already understand and it will move you fast. The difference is whether the shape of the system was in your head before you started.
Abundance makes quality visible
The highest leverage engineers are not the ones producing the most code. They are the ones enforcing taste. They shape a system through constraint. They protect clarity. They treat software as a finished object somebody else has to live with.
Bespoke shoes did not disappear when the factory arrived. They got easier to spot.
Care still commands a premium. There is simply more to compare it against now.