> You treat your code as a means to an end to make a product for a user.

It isn’t that though, the “end” here is making money not building products for users. Typically people who are making products for users cares about the craft.

If the means-to-end people could type words into a box and get money out the other side, they would prefer to deal with that than products or users.

Thats why ai slop is so prevalent — the people putting it out there don’t care about the quality of their output or how it’s used by people, as long as it juices their favorite metrics - views, likes, subscribes, ad revenue whatever. Products and users are not in scope.