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Comment by datakan | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the honesty and I think I get it. The AI doing the code leap frogs you to a finished product which is the reward. I do worry about craftmanship in that scenario though.

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The finished product alone does not have to be the reward. The reward can still be building a great tool, a great application, etc. With AI we can build it 100x faster, freeing us up to think deeper about our test coverage, our design, our scaling, our observability.

There is no excuse for lazy execution using AI, that is, IMO, equivalent to shoddy software engineering. it's just faster and more accessible now. "AI slop" is just poor execution delivered more quickly.

The onus is still on the human in the drivers seat to deliver quality outcomes.

How can building an application feel like a reward when you're not the one who built it?

And before you post the obvious response, no, if you're truly "100x faster", you're not reading or even thinking about anything the AI is outputting. The time math doesn't add up.

You seem to have a narrow definition of "build it". LLMs don't have agency. If I build software using an LLM I built it. Just like if I build a house out of lumber from a lumber mill, I built it even though I didn't hand carve the 2x4s.

Now, what if you order a construction crew for building your house? What if you also hire an architect to design the plan? And an overseer who manages everything?

Surely at some point you would stop saying "I built this house", even if you ordered and financed it?

This is getting a bit off-topic, but there are certainly people who will still say that they built it. That is, in a nutshell, how people try to reconcile desert theory with the existence of the super-wealthy.

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