> mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics

I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes.

Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected.

In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.

They care in principle, for the most part bad code makes changes and extensions slow to implement and causes unnecessary production issues which costs time and money. But there is always the tension between implementing something quickly now and being able to implement things quickly in the future and unfortunately the preference is almost always quickly now despite everyone knowing that this is the way more expensive choice in the long run.