Interesting analogy choices. Aren’t straight razors still the highest quality shave? We go with electric and cartridge because it’s faster and cheaper and takes less skill to get a decent result

Digital cameras are another interesting one. Since capturing images is so cheap we just snap a bunch of frames without a lot of thought towards composing them carefully, with a side effect that we get an overwhelming amount of mediocre frames and a few good ones, but we have to sift through.

I’m still not convinced I want to make this tradeoff in programming. But I work in scientific computing where I think it’s (still) really important to understand what modeling assumptions you are making through code

Yup - I think there will remain a space for artisanal code for a decent while yet, particularly in things like scientific computing, safety critical systems, and similar - but for most purposes, the cartridge shave will be good enough, more convenient, and much, much cheaper.