Artifacts No Longer Have Inherent Value
Before LLMs, media artifacts - articles, books, videos, audio, any media - had a type of inherent value. The effort it took to create them and the expertise that was needed to create them convincingly, was tied to the value of the artifact itself. An artifact could not exist otherwise.
An artifact generated without effort or expertise was called cheating or copying.
Ah us sweet summer children.
We now live in a world where quality artifacts can in fact be generated without expertise or effort. This has led us to challenge the definition of quality. There is no consensus.
This has led us into a curious shadowy world of quality appraisal when considering generated artifacts produced by people WITH expertise who have expended effort. The LLM becomes a leveraging force when guided with attention and competency. The trick is defining competency. Aside from the mechanics of agentic engineering, it seems to boil down to good communication skills and deep domain knowledge. Management.
We see the collective crisis of the software engineer of 2026 play out. You don't need to look too far into Reddit to read another story of a software engineer distraught while functioning as a manager of coding agents. They have been forced to surrender the flow state required by rigorous mental architecture to relaying specs and requirements handed down to them from those in charge of the artifact's intended direction in some demented game of telephone.
You also don't need to look too far into Reddit to read the stories of software engineers elated and giddy at the power coding agents bring. They find themselves needing to adjust their expectations of what is possible, and think in terms of higher levels of productivity and ambition.
The latter is as heady a mix as the former is forlorn.
The latter has embraced that an artifact's value is no longer bound to the qualities of its creation, or creator.
The former mourns it.
Deterministic checks, observability, CI, testing, provability... these are the levers that get moved now. You don't build the object. You build the mold, and pour the substrate into it.
Maybe not too far from those who saw the advent of 3D printing as the death knell of their handcrafted artisanal practice, whatever they might have been making.
We grew up loving the artifact. That's all we'd known. And we measured utility from afar in part aesthetically, by measuring the production of it.
Now, the utility of the artifact operates on two levels:
- what it can do or offer, directly tied to how much someone might pay to own or access it
- how it was produced, directly tied to whether and how it was generated or created traditionally
Art, music, code, apps, most any domain AI can convincingly generate in, occupies the first band.
Appreciation for hand-wrought creation occupies the second.
People want to know the story behind an artifact when the story is inherently tied to it, which is the case for art and music.
People care less for engineering.
When something like software development contains a bit of both, we get to see how much of each it has, as we watch the market reprice its production in real time.