People love their craft and want to really understand how a tool works. They might start with taking a tool apart, looking at how it works, putting it back together and then using it for a bit. Then they need a similar tool for a slightly different use case, so they start making one themselves. Maybe they have more specific, detailed needs than existing tools. Maybe there is something about the tool that annoys them or they think they could make it work better. This keeps going over time.

> This was the craftsman’s ‘Golden Age’ and much time and trouble was taken over the design of tools. Craftsmen were being called upon to do more skilful and exacting work and the use of tools and the interest in development had become very widespread.

Above pulled from A Brief History of the Woodworking Plane [0]. A woodworking tool that has evolved over 2,000 years. Now there are electric planers, handheld electric planers and lots of heavy machinery that do the same thing in a very automated way. If a company is mass producing kitchen cabinets, they aren't hand planing edges on boards, a machine is doing all that work.

I feel like with AI we are on the cusp of moving beyond a "Golden age" and into an "industrial age" for coding, where it will become more important to have code that AI understands vs. something that is carefully crafted. Simple business pressure will demand it (whether we like it or not). The difference with hand planes (and other woodworking tools/concepts) is that a lot of people can appreciate a piece of furniture and the craft that went into it by opening a drawer and seeing hand cut dovetails for example. When it comes to digital products, none of the consumers of the product will really care about the craftsman that created a JS library that they are indirectly using on a web site that has its "view source" hidden with minification/obfuscation.

[0] https://www.handplane.com/879/a-brief-history-of-the-woodwor...