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The customer can absolutely tell the difference between a Caterpillar digger and a dude in it vs 100 dudes with shovels

Attempting to illustrate why your analogy is flawed and explain myself a little better I would add that there are quantitive things and qualitative things. If the object was to remove some volume of earth (quantitive) then whether it is moved by a Caterpillar or by 100 men with shovels does not matter.

If you're 'no longer looking at the code' or 'looping everything' then you are implicitly moving towards a more quantitive outlook of software development. How it does so becomes less and less meaningful and why would you even care?

I'm saying I'd rather have a dude in a digger than a hundred folks who need to be supplied, some of them drunk, some of them thieves, some of them just plain bad at digging and only making a mess of the dig site.

In this metaphor, your dude in a digger could also be drunk or a thief or bad at his job, and that'd be a bigger problem vs. a few people from a 100 person hand crew.

This is true, but my priors say it’s much less likely to get a thief or a drunk in a digger than in a group of a hundred folks with shovels.

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