Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers.
Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc.
When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.
Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!
If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt pride in that.
But I think most of this stuff is iterative, multi-turn. You type a thing in, see what comes back, and then repeat until you have something that satisfies your desire.
Taking the manager analogy. If you spent 30-minutes writing up a draft spec, waited for the outputs, had a review meeting where you provided good feedback, and then repeated that cycle until the product was done... Again, I think that manager (assuming, of course, that their feedback was useful) should feel some pride in shaping that output!
I think it's much closer to the art commission than it is to a manager who is managing humans, the constraints of the business, customers, etc.
And then there's the bullshit artists.
Just because we never had the option of a chisel before doesn't mean all chiselers are bullshit artists.
Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you feel accomplishment?
Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.
Prompting an LLM neither requires comparative effort nor is comparatively challenging, thus it's would be odd to feel a sense of pride from any associated outcomes.
I cannot believe this even requires an explanation.
Prompting an LLM to produce good code isn't a lot of work for you. Writing hex without an assembler or compiler would be a lot of work for you.
People have ideas, and now they have better tools to turn those ideas into reality. They aren't doing it like you would do it, but they're getting it done all the same, getting their needs met, and enjoying the ride.
Maybe just let people have fun, and when they report that they are in fact having fun... believe them.
The difference between the skill & effort required to build vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude different. If it took just as much effort, people would just do it by hand anyways.
There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.
I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.
2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists
3. You took even a tiny action towards #2
Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real world; this is the same thing in the small.
I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.
He was so excited when he got something to work he called me immediately.
I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access to Claude. ;-)
But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.
However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."
I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get any sense of accomplishment from authoring software.
For anybody else thought, I get that a LLM is a regression (npi) where you don't have to learn or understand anything .. therefore the personal growth value is moot (except the alleged sales if the person tries to use LLM to create a side business).
For actual devs it's disheartening and caused me real grief seeing how many of them were happy not thinking anymore.
What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.
Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.
Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.
Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that with the requirements to the extents possible"?
It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
When I make things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide. It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make. That's borderline condescending and pitiful.
But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too. But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this? Makes no sense.
And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the jackpot on a slot machine.
Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.
Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value
As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!
That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.