Comment by silves89

I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.

There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.

Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.

However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.

But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.

All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.