I was at a cafe at the weekend - the basic greasy spoon type you find in garden centres, nothing fancy about it. The walls had some AI-generated artwork that was clearly budget-friendly decoration. At the table next to me, a woman was taking photos for what was clearly an online review. I overheard her complaint to her companion: "I can't believe they're using AI-generated art. How dare they?"
It struck me how misplaced her outrage was. This was a basic cafe with an obvious shoestring budget. For them, the alternative to AI-generated art wasn't commissioning a local artist - it was bare walls or generic stock photos. The AI art at least gave the place some visual interest without breaking the bank. Yet here was someone ready to penalise them in an online review for daring to use modern tools to make their space slightly less dreary.
This encounter reminded me of a conversation I'd had recently with one of the engineers on my team, someone whose thoughtfulness I really respect. He'd been at a market with his wife where they'd bought something described as "artisanal" - meaning handmade rather than produced by industrial processes. His observation was that you could tell it was handmade just by looking at it. Something produced mechanically might have been more perfect, but the handmade item was more beautiful. For things like jewellery or homewares, we genuinely appreciate an item more when we know greater human endeavour has gone into creating it.
But then he got me thinking about diamonds. When I bought my wife's engagement ring, I deliberately chose synthetic diamonds. They had perfect colour, perfect clarity, no inclusions, and honestly, you get more carats for your money. The jeweller told me that some people still spend significantly more on mined natural diamonds despite them being inferior products in every measurable way. A diamond mine isn't a nice place - it's an environment of industrial extraction, often involving dangerous working conditions and environmental damage. Does the argument about human endeavour creating desirability grotesquely extend to human suffering, or even human lives altogether?
The Artisanal Spectrum
This got me thinking about where different products and services sit on what I call the artisanal spectrum. At one end, handmade jewellery and homewares are clearly more desirable to most people. There's genuine value in the craftsmanship, the slight imperfections that show human touch, the knowledge that someone invested their skill and time into creating something unique.
Mined diamonds occupy a more complex middle ground. The majority of people would probably choose the superior synthetic option, but there's still a significant portion who prefer "natural" diamonds, despite the ethical and quality concerns. It's an interesting case where tradition and marketing have created artificial scarcity and desirability around what is objectively the worse product.
But what about code? The idea that an organisation might ban AI tools and market their software as "artisanal" feels absurd. Imagine a company proudly advertising their "hand-coded" features, claiming that the little bugs and inefficiencies are charming imperfections that remind you a human made it. Picture banks making a selling point of their COBOL systems, maintained by a dwindling group of masters who are among the last people left who know how to work with such legacy technology.
It's clearly ridiculous. Nobody wants artisanal code. Users care about software that works well, solves their problems efficiently, and provides value. They don't care whether a human spent weeks manually writing functions that AI could have generated in minutes, any more than they care whether their calculators perform arithmetic using hand-crafted algorithms.
Yet somehow, as AI tools become more prevalent in software development, we're seeing the same resistance that would seem laughable if applied to other tools that improve efficiency and quality.
The Real Value of Human Work
The key insight is understanding where human creativity and innovation actually add value. In software development, that's not in writing boilerplate code, debugging syntax errors, or implementing standard algorithms. It's in understanding business problems, designing elegant solutions, making architectural decisions, and creating user experiences that truly serve people's needs.
AI excels at automating the toil - the repetitive, well-understood tasks that consume time but don't require creativity or novel thinking. It can generate code faster than humans, catch basic errors more consistently, and handle routine implementations without fatigue. But it can't understand your specific business context, make strategic technology decisions, or navigate the complex trade-offs that characterise meaningful software development work.
If you're worried about AI replacing you, the answer isn't to resist the tools or try to compete with them on tasks they're naturally suited for. It's to learn to wield them yourself, using them to eliminate the mundane aspects of your work so you can focus on the parts that genuinely require human insight, creativity, and judgement.
Only you know your job well enough to identify where AI can add the most value. Look for the repetitive tasks, the time-consuming but straightforward implementations, the routine testing scenarios. Let AI handle those, and save your human endeavour for solving novel problems, making strategic decisions, and creating innovative solutions.
Learning from History
I'm reminded of an early Microsoft Excel advertisement that perfectly captures this dynamic. Picture the scene: businessmen in a lift, heading to see their boss who's expecting a report they haven't completed yet. One is panicking, frantically coming up with excuses for why the work isn't done. The other calmly pulls out his laptop - which, being the 1980s, requires two people to hold - and begins producing the report right there in the lift, saving the day with Excel's new features before they reach their boss's floor.
In the background, a couple of ambient businessmen who seem to just ride the lift all day observe this miracle of productivity and declare, "My spreadsheet can't do that." It's wonderfully on-the-nose: the way they've always done things, presumably with paper and pencil, is about to become obsolete.
Watching this advertisement today is genuinely funny - the enormous laptop, the earnest delivery, the dramatic music over what's essentially data entry. But at the time, it got people excited about innovation. Companies weren't ashamed to advertise that they were using cutting-edge tools to work more efficiently. The message was clear: embrace these new capabilities or get left behind.
Today, an equivalent advertisement about AI might be considered in poor taste due to the controversy surrounding these tools. But the fundamental dynamic is identical. We're seeing the same resistance from people who would have been the paper-and-pencil holdouts forty years ago, lamenting the accountants and pencil manufacturers put out of work by formulas and pivot tables.
The Choice Ahead
There are fundamentally two camps emerging: those who are resisting AI adoption by boycotting companies that use it or trying to get its use restricted, and those who are excited about its applications and the ways it will change and improve how we work.
The resisters, like the woman in the cafe, often miss the practical realities. They imagine a world where AI is replacing authentic human creativity, when in many cases it's enabling creativity that couldn't have existed otherwise. The cafe's budget wouldn't have stretched to commissioning original artwork from local artists - the choice was AI-generated art that perfectly suited their space, or generic stock images that served no one.
The embracers understand that AI is a tool, not a replacement for human judgment and creativity. They're using it to automate routine tasks, generate starting points for creative work, and handle the mundane aspects of their jobs so they can focus on higher-value activities.
If you're worried about AI coming for your job, remember this: it can't replace you if you learn to wield it yourself. If AI can produce as much value as you currently do, you need to learn to produce more value, and the best way to do that right now is to embrace these tools rather than resist them.
The future belongs to those who understand that human creativity and AI capability aren't opposing forces - they're complementary strengths that, when combined thoughtfully, create far more value than either could alone.
It's up to you to learn and grow with the times. The lift is moving, and you need to decide whether you're getting out that laptop or making excuses about why your spreadsheet can't do that.