Maybe its became so intelligent it now wants to troll people as a way to create factions among the populace.

I can confirm, Press On Vinyl makes their own stampers, originally they sent the masters to London and got stampers back but in the last year or so they upgraded the factory and they now do it all in house. Including a mastering studio, if anyone wants to press vinyl please check out kushtybuckrecords.com or pressonvinyl.com (I am the developer of kushtybuckrecords)

unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives

I think the key line is the ease in which we can create tools. A software engineer has free access to the lumber yard. Builders of old had to work hard to create tools to create tools.

Cost and ease are different concerns.

On ease, much of what a woodworker needs can be built from wood and with basic hand tools, so the woodworker, by definition can build many of their own tools.

This is similar to programming, where much of what a programmer needs can be written in code.

On cost, simple observation of woodshops—including many in person and among acquaintances that are not professionals—has shown me that the cost is not prohibitive. Every shop I have seen includes a significant amount of self-built tools and fixtures.

Cost also explains the difference in programming environments I have seen. I have met a great many professional programmers, some of whom have no scripts directory or self-written tools, whose only programming output is their direct work product. This reflects the fact that professional-grade tools are available for free to programmers.

As individuals, my observations lead me to understand woodworkers as much more likely to use their skills to build tools for themselves. The same holds true of other craftspeople I have had the opportunity to observe; even in small, one-off projects, it is common to use elements of the craft to build a tool or otherwise aid the endeavor in a way that is not directly producing the work product.

As a collection, I would agree that programmers build tools that allow us to do our work better. The open source community is incredible. Because of the collective action and the cost to individuals, it is much less common for those individual programmers to have to write tools for themselves.

I would argue that it is similarly easy, but circumstances lead to these disparate outcomes.

No capital costs, and seldom held back by constraints of the existing tools were using to build the next tool.