> their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value
Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't?
Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower.
How is that comparable to the arts?
Dwarf Fortress (the ASCII version) was exhibited in MoMA. I think software sits in an interesting place between shovels and Fabergé eggs.
Hmm, game design is a little different to other forms of software, and DF in particular since it's a niche interest that happened gained a following and became profitable. Would a temple-os be exhibited in MoMA?
Oh, you're not going to bait me into that one! "What is Art?" is the central 20th century aesthetic question, which no one ever answered to anyone else's satisfaction. Nowadays artists and critics have mostly stopped addressing it, because it's just exhausting, and everyone gets on with whatever it is they do. (But, yes: every profession can be Art is one of the answers some people propose! You can make your own mind up about that.)
What I observe, however, is that the people on this board who most mourn the end of hand-coding talk about code much like artists talk about art. It also, if it is to continue, looks like it will be an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti. However you care to define the practice itself, economically speaking, that's an art market.
Probably, those folks are in an even worse position than that. Though I've written some software I'm proud of, I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly competent developer, and while I can appreciate clean code, and love 'the story of Mel', and all that, would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app or whatever? No, I frankly wouldn't - and I'm to the right of probably 98% of the general population on the appreciates-software-aesthetics curve. The fine arts world depends on the money it generates from its own rightmost 2%, but are there enough wealthy patrons for whom hand-crafted software will be a prestige marker? That's difficult to imagine.
> you're not going to bait me into that one!
but it's you throwing around the term. e.g. "economically speaking, that's an art market" - in what sense? How do you define an "art market"? It all seems very tautological.
> aesthetics-driven pursuit
aesthetics can usually biased by utility, to the extent of being a proxy for it. You can find the aerodynamics of a aeroplane or hummingbird wing beautiful, but there is still functionality driving it.
aesthetics is not the opposite of instrumental value; perhaps affective value, or sentimentality is?
> would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app
what is artisanal code? I think talking about ux design conflates things, consider only backend code.
> what is artisanal code?
A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.
> How do you define an "art market"?
In the preceding sentence:
> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.
It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.
> consider only backend code.
Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?
I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.