Comment by sean2d

Yes, I think so too. Just like there is a demand for handmade objects like vases, cooking knives and beverages, which was the norm before the industrial revolution and has now become a thing of intrinsic value, provides they are of higher quality than their factory-made counterparts (I have a background in the spirits industry, where "small batch" and "handmade" have often been used to justify premium prices despite clearly lower quality. I've become a little more discerning since when I see those labels anywhere and don't take quality for granted).

I think you overestimate how many users actually care that something is mediocre or not, as long as it gets the job done.

The issue is how much demand.

We have tailors around the world, but Zara and other brands do the lion's share of business.

Automation in physical labour resulted in less work for physical labour. There are still some people producing hand crafted work, but the market doesn't need that many of them.

A much smaller group of people can serve the needs of an entire state.

Demand from whom? I think a lot of people are pretty constantly observing that software quality in applications they use (or are forced to interact with) has been declining across the board for a while, and that this seems to have accelerated recently. The average lay understanding of this is "because AI" but it's probably a combination of sometimes being models producing sloppy code and sometimes being poor morale and management and product design in this industry that's essentially coming apart at the seams from the perspective of its workforce. I think it's uncontroversial to say that people already dislike this and wish for better software quality. For the most part, though, they either don't have or won't use any levers of market pressure for this. Their software choices are largely limited to what google or apple will allow for their phones, or what employers require them to use. I'll tell anyone who will listen that they should use FOSS where they can, but people really resist this idea even where it's extremely feasible and the tradeoffs are mostly familiarity (like their desktop OS). Consumers of software seem to partially think this way because they have been disempowered so thoroughly that they seldom have a choice

So as market pressure goes, that leaves employers. I do see the occasional oddball project that resists this wave, but "doing things correctly even if it takes longer" is not a value you're really allowed to have in an economy where the make or break factor for your business is usually getting investment capital, and capital is, as a population, probably the most all-in on LLMs of anyone, to the point where I believe they'd push for vibecoding even in instances where they can't find numbers that justify doing so.

A ton of people not in tech hate genAI so much that they say they'll, for example, not purchase a game if they know someone used it for any part of it, and yell about it online, and such, but games are pretty much the only consumer-facing software people make purchasing decisions about, so maybe that moves a needle there, but gamers failed to rally against microtransactions, DLC piecemealing, or even things like always-on DRM or revoking purchases that literally remove their ability to play their games, so I doubt that's going to materialize a change in something that could be more easily obfuscated in response to this pressure like the provenance of the software

Market pressures require at least a somewhat free market, and the overall american market for software is drastically distorted by various oligopsonies that by and large has a vested interest in LLMs (and specifically the corporate black box ones) being used for as much as possible