Hacker News Reader

Comment by kranner | Hacker News Reader

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this.

But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics.

So which is it?

Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?

View on HN

Do you disagree with his analogy?

Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially.

100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI.

The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so they were killed in mass market pottery products and had to find a tiny niche. Before industrialization handmade pottery was mass market pottery. It was outcompeted in mass market and had to move into a niche.

And that part of doesn't even translate into code. People are not buying lines of code, so you're not going to be buying handmade code.

Handmade pottery can offer variety (designs) not available in mass produced pottery. When you look at software, you can't tell if it was 100% handwritten or written with assistance of AI.

If the argument was about cost per unit output, bringing in Etsy didn't make sense at all, especially when they explicitly mention it was about valuing different things.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.

This is interesting because the cost of cloning code is zero. The human written code could be cheaper than the AI one because of the cost of distribution. The same does not apply for pottery because to create/distribute an extra bowl, you need >0 resources.

My point is (and the issue I have with the article) is that the quality of code (whatever that means) is not measured by the number of lines. Whether the code is generated by AI or humans, the market is not going to care. Same where it didn't care whether it was written by someone in Silicon Valley or in the middle of East Asia.

And why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?

I'm not too familiar with etsy, but presumably most etsy sellers are closer to being lemonade stands than they are to being ikea

And yes, sometimes it's nice to support a local lemonade stand. For my family's income, I know which segment I'd feel more confident to work for..

Quality indie software in a niche that Ikea is not addressing can make a decent income unlike a lemonade stand.

And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.

The comparison valid for his example would be to compare revenues from mass produced pottery vs. revenues of handmade pottery sold on etsy.

Methinks that mass produced pottery makes more than $2 billion and etsy pottery is a tiny fraction of overall etsy sales.

'It's not X, it's Y' sentence formulations are usually indicative of LLM assisted writing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com