A good chunk of our profession is just hype-followers at this point.

Sounds to me like OP wanted to be the executive ordering his engineer team to build something rather than him being the engineer that actually builds it.

Also, "But clay didn't go away. Ceramics studios are everywhere now. People pay good money to throw pots on weekends.". What misguided statement. The population of full-time pottery workers didn't all open studios (likely a tiny percentage but it is more likely that the pottery studio people do not come from a pottery factory background) and those who opened them are likely not able to obtain a full-time equivalent level of income by catering to people like OP.

The article reads like a privileged person who lacks the ability to empathize with the disenfranchised.

http://laputan.org/mud/

The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.

I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".

I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.

Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?

Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.

Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?

Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.

Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".

Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!

As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."