The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this.

The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced.

This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.

There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.