In Germany, in this case selling shovels if you want to take the example literally is selling construction machines, or renting them, versus having guest workers digging the holes.
Are you aware AI companies are subsidizing usage and have negative revenue?
And now your comparison is inaccurate. I said whole application. So the correct one would be selling/renting construction vehicles vs building entire building and here selling/renting is maybe 10% of developer income.
Digging a hole is like making small code change and if you wish to continue using this analogy then tokens are digging a hole and selling entire applications (thing Software house do) is construction company building entire building
Second obviously deliver more cash and here AI premise starts to crack. AI can't deliver anything good, costs much more than developing team (Uber proved it) and even if you use it as hard as possible and it does what it suppose to deliver max 5% increase across the board
Naturally we can't use figures of speech.