My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.

That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.

I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?

If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.

What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.