A lot of people have a hard time differentiating between craft and art. Both sound quite similar, but they are not the same.

You can have one and be lacking in the other.

When you get better at drawing, you've improved your craft.

Now, when you use your craft as a means of expression, that is art.

Given how hard it is to define art it can still uncontroversially be distilled down to the application of the creative process.

So, being good at a craft and merely following the vision of others is sadly not sufficient to be an artist. To be an artist you must create, use your imagination and bring your visions to fruition -- that is the creative process.

To get an emotionally detached view of this, let's compare this with a different profession instead - Software Developers.

Today, if you are precise in what you want, you can have an AI model write out almost accurate code that executes up to a few hundred lines quite easily in a matter of seconds. This is at least an hour or two's work for the average developer.

Writing code is a skill, now that AI writes it, does it mean developers become obsolete? Not at all, on the contrary, when you ask them they will tell you they feel like they suddenly went from walking to racing around on a motorcycle. It's a thrilling experience.

Software Development as most think is not just about writing code. Yes, a software developer should be skilled in writing code, but that is not enough. In the same way that an author is required to be proficient in the use of language, it is a required skill but it is not sufficient.

The real meat and potatoes of what a software developer does is in the thinking and planning. Tons of questions like, What are the interfaces exposed? What tradeoffs are acceptable? How much data can we acceptably lose vs How much performance that may boost? How many requests can we allow to fail? What values need to be configurable and tons of small things like these

All these things need judgment and an understanding of the context that is beyond the software itself.

On the contrary, a coder is someone who just writes code as per the specification they're given. They are a mere tool that does the bidding of others.

To a consumer of whatever you make – i.e. your company, boss or client – whoever pays the bills.

They only care about your skill in the context of how you can use that skill to provide them with the solution they need. If your skills cannot build them the solution that they need, then, to them your skills are worthless.

So, if you remain a mere skills guy, you'll get obsoleted because skills can get replaced.

But, if you are a person who views what they do is to provide solutions to problems using skills as a tool in a toolkit where the tools keep getting updated and used and discarded as per the situation, you will always remain in demand.