Is craftsmanship overrated?

Thinking about the recent 💥 in AI technologies fascinates me from many perspectives. One of them is the question of craftsmanship.

In the recent past, we saw that new strategies and technologies in the production of goods such as food, clothes or furniture resulted in a situation where quantity wins over quality.

Just notice when walking through the aisles of a fast fashion chain or meandering in the wonderfully homey IKEA journey. All these wonderful things, just for me! Gosh.

The current inhabitants of the middle class around the world eat food that was grown fast and loaded with fillers, wear clothes that will fall apart within the year, and sit on sofas that will need to be replaced within five.

I can feel the pain of the farmers, carpenters and tailors whose crafts were cheapened. Now, it’s my turn: AI comes for the writers, the coders, the thinkers. Designers, photographers, illustrators, film makers, copywriters, journalists, programmers, customer service representatives, you name it. Nobody is safe.

As a certain Michael F. Buckley, a designer, writes in his fantastic essay Quality won’t save designers from AI.

History suggests that speed and affordability often outweigh craftsmanship when consumer habits are reshaped.

This quote has been haunting me ever since.

My own craft as a data journalist and educator is rich: I code, I do research, I write, I teach. I have been using LLMs to write texts, conduct online research, create images and code for me (and with me) over the past couple of months. On a regular basis I use ChatGPT, Visual Electric, DeepSeek and Claude.

When coding, I’ve tried it all: asking the robot to write boring scrapers for me in a language I understand well (Python) or to code a little app that exports vector charts in a language I barely get (JavaScript).

They call it vibe coding. You instruct the LLM in plain speech and the AI transforms that thinking into executable code.

And since almost anybody writing code today has been seduced with the allure of vibe coding, sometimes I ask myself: Has the craft I have been honing for years lost it’s value overnight? Or will it in a year?

It seems not to be the case (yet). There is much more to data journalism than plain coding. But I also feel I have to learn to work with the robots in order to stay relevant and competitive in my field.

To grow my craft with the new tools, not in spite of them. Because they can also be great interns, sparring partners and even teachers.

But I also need to be careful. When I have the robot write code for me, I feel myself succumbing to the vibe. The comfort is taking over, and I stop engaging with the content and I let it do its thing.

But when I stop engaging with the content, I stop understanding and learning new things. And there is no craft in blindly following your tools.

This applies to writing, researching, teaching and even baking or fixing my German grammar mistakes. Use the robot to do things, but ask it why it did what it did and try to learn from it. To make the craft shine brighter.

Because if we only let them do their thing, we might drown—under bad code, under meaningless text, just as we drown in the mountains of fast-produced clothes piling up in the Chilean desert or the beaches of Ghana.

So is craftsmanship overrated? No. I believe it’s actually one of the more beautiful things we have available to us as humans. If anything, we should cherish it more. And we can do so with the robots too, if we like.