But an artist who values the end result over the craft is hardly an artist at all. They're a merchant at heart. The art is the product, and what excites them is shipping product.
For an artist at heart, however, the process is the product. Lucky for them, its about to become a lot more valuable.
AI programming isn't going to improve the state of the craft. Developers hate AI coding tools for the same reason they hated Dreamweaver back in the 00s: the generated code was crap. You'd spend more time "fixing" the generated code than you'd spend writing it from scratch.
What it is going to do is finally kill this obsession the tech industry has with moving fast and breaking things. We can't compete with AI on speed and breaking things. It's just not humanly possible. It's going to force the entire industry to find other metrics to compete on. I hope that's going to be quality (performance, uptime, and reliability), but, then again, I'm an optimist in this regard.
It's the same with music and art, too. AI isn't going to replace musicians and artists, but it is going to make them compete on different metrics than they're used to.
The tools are going to get better, and it’s going to lift everyone while doing so. But it will vary across task.
The bottom tier of engineers will have improvements to their code.
The top engineers will move faster. Top engineers will still be great at what they do.
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The same thing is happening in music. Everyone gets lifted but on different dimensions.
Also, when it comes to music, who are the people in the rock and roll hall of fame? Those who can play the guitar real good? Or those who crafted songs that people love? AI will never be able to do the latter. But, AI can play power chords better than any session guitarist. That session guitarist is going to have to learn how to compete in another way than his guitar playing skill.
This means having to knock out tasks each sprint, whether they tickle my fancy or not. If I can offload that work to the AI “agent”, then so be it.
I don’t feel the need to make my vocation a core part of my identity, so the time savings is worth more than elegantly crafted code or whatever other intrinsic value comes from a hand crafted solution.
This is similar to the rage from 2010-2022 when developers, often at the behest of their employers, enthusiastically promoted the idea than everyone needs to learn how to code.