Handmade is mostly a story

We tell ourselves handmade means better. Most of the time, it doesn't.

The clothes you are wearing were made mostly by machines. Even the cheap ones are probably better made than what people used to sew at home by candlelight. We didn't lose a lot on quality, but certainly we lost part of the story, the feeling that a human made it.

And mostly, people don't miss that part consciously. Nobody will care that their neighborhood fast food place got its website from an AI tool instead of a person. They will order their burger and never think about it so long as it has no bugs and the food comes warm.

The human made feeling still has some value, but only where a culture keeps telling the story. Hand-knotted carpets are still treasured heirlooms in some areas like Iran, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere. But in most of Europe, people buy their rug from IKEA and never think about the weavers the machines replaced.

AI art and code automation are on the same path. Yes, a lot of what it makes today is sloppy unless you guide it carefully. But that is also temporary. Machines get better, and they will outperform us at scale and, more often than we like to admit, in quality too.

So be honest about where that leaves you. You can become an operator, the one who runs the machines and automates the work. In programming it might be just another level of abstraction, like going from assembly to a higher level language. Or become the rarer luxury maker in a corner where the story still sells.

Don't bet your career on people paying more because a human made it. That is a bet against the machine getting better, and it usually does.