alt Hacker NewsI’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.
I’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.
> 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.