I have been rewriting how I explain what I sell, and the rewrite has been clarifying in a way I did not expect.
I used to sell deliverables. A logo, a website, a system. Nouns. Things you could point at, count, and put on an invoice, which is comfortable for everyone, though I am not sure the noun was ever really what anybody was buying.
Nobody wants a website. That has probably always been true, and it is harder to ignore now, because a website costs almost nothing to produce. A machine will generate a competent one before your coffee goes cold. If the artefact were the value, the value would be close to zero, and I do not think a way of working built only on it can last.
What a person is actually buying, and maybe always was, is a decision. Which thing to build. What to leave out. Where their money will do work and where it would only be spent. The artefact is just the receipt for a judgment that was made carefully.
So the judgment has become the thing. Not a flourish on top of the work. The work itself. And that changes how I price, because I am no longer selling hours or pages or components, all of which are nearly free now. I am selling the years behind the hour it takes to look at a business and get some sense of what it needs.
It also changes who I can help. When the artefact was the value, everyone was a possible client, and I was competing on price with the whole world. When judgment is the value, I can only really help people who want to be told the truth. That is a smaller room, and a better one.
The machines did not take my job. They took the part of it I could hide behind, and left me holding the only thing I was ever really paid for.