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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil. Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce.

edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether certain mechanics are inherently toilistic or creative. I realized that a LOT of what I do feels creative but isn't - the manner in which I type, the way I shape and format code. It's more in the manner of catharsis than creation.

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You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work.

Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are.

If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of the program when you outsource those things to an agent. (And I would say, you sacrifice some quality as well).

I suspect there are different definitions of "toil" being used here.

Google defined "toil" as, very roughly, all the non-coding work that goes into building, deploying, managing a system: https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/ , https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ .

Quote: "Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."

Variations of this definition are widely used.

If we map that onto your writing example, "toil" would be related to tasks like getting the work published, not the writing process itself.

With this definition of toil, you can certainly remove the toil without removing the creative work.

You can remove a lot of toil from the writing process without taking away a writer's ability to do line edits. There's a lot of outlining, organization, bookkeeping and continuity work AI automates in the early draft/structural editing process.

Most writers can't even get a first draft of anything done, and labor under the mistaken assumption that a first draft is just a few minor edits away from being the final book. The reality is that a first draft might be 10% of the total time of the book, and you will do many rounds of rereading and major structural revision, then several rounds of line editing. AI is bad at line editing (though it's ok at finding things to nitpick), so even if your first draft and rough structural changes are 100% AI, you have basically a 0% chance of getting published unless you completely re-write it as part of the editing process.

It all depends on how you split the difference. I wouldn't call the emdash vs comma problem toil. It's fine-grained and there are technical aspects to the decision, but it's also fundamentally part of the output.

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