Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness. They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.
Each stage takes greater effort, effort which creates skill. Those hard-earned skills are accomplishments to be proud of.
But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.
That actually happens all the time on Show HN these days.
edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?
would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.
If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain computer did for you.
But there are many other reasons to want to be able to speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a new market to great success without having to rely on the German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and without wasting years to learn German on his own when all he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a goal to him.
Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.
And even though the computer is doing something for the person, they are leveraging that for something that they feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that was only possible thanks to the existence of the German speaking skills of the computer).
Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.
Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?
If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?
The very concept of "reverse centaur" implies a balance towards the "order pizza online" side of the equation.
Now generalize this. Every tiny community, every person with a disability, everybody for whom the default software doesn't work right? Can now change it specifically for them. Not add peperoni, that's far too low-dimensional to capture what is happening. Actually build their own interface, be able to use something they simply didn't have access to before, and critically not depend on another programmer (there are like a dozen of us blind ones!) to build something for them.
You can feel happy about the result, you can find the house useful, but you shouldn't feel a sense of building accomplishment, because you didn't build anything.
With AI & apps there's less friction, because you don't even have to hire another human being, it's just prompting. In that sense, it's definitely closer to ordering food from an app.
In any case, in the context of TFA, there's also a sense of low quality, cheaply made. The bots making the PRs aren't reading the contribution guidelines, so that's low quality all by itself. Drowning a human reviewer with a mass of PR is also a low quality way of contributing.