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I know many people agree but I can’t really follow this sentiment. I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM even if I did not write a single line of code for it. I wouldn’t show it around and proclaim what a great programmer I am, because I did not program it, but coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product. When I plan a remake of my garden and then hire a professional landscaping company to build it, I can still sit on my patio in the sunset with a cold beer and be proud of my new cozy environment. I feed the same way about software. My vibe coded guitar tab editor has features that no other software has that I needed and it’s solving a real problem I had. I would never have created it without AI, because I simply don’t have the time besides my job, family and other hobbies (like really practicing playing guitar). So fine, tell me I shouldn’t be proud of it, but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

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> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it.

To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

It can also apply to tasks where you've offloaded a bunch of work that once would've been done by hand, like "I made this bench using a circular saw."

Where things get hairy even with physical objects is processes like CNC or 3D printers. If you download "Articulated dragon.stl" from a website and press the print button, did you make that? Personally, no. But if you designed your own flexy dragon and printed it, then yes. If you set up a relief carving on a CNC machine or do a perfectly fit inlay, are you making that? Operating these still takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill, but different knowledge and skill from hand woodworking. What if the tools improve and become very easy to operate?

I don't think there's a hard line you can draw. But if there is, it's somewhere between "did everything by hand with no assistance from recently invented tools because those are cheating" and "ordered a sandwich and waited for the finished result to show up."

The restaurant comparison doesn't really hold up. The parent didn't go choose from a menu of new apps that they wanted AI to create. They discovered a problem or a feature that doesn't exist on other platforms and they employed tools to create that. Does a product manager not get to claim they "made" something because they plan it out and employ others to actually build the finished product?

Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.

You did not make the cheeseburger.

Yet,

Christopher Nolan made "The Odyssey"

Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"

Mark Zuckerberg made "Meta"

I feel just as proud of everything I'm making with LLM, image, and video models as I do the code I wrote by hand for years and the photons I shot on film to make movies.

This is just a new higher level thing. I'm still the "director".

It's my design and my taste.

Author is right about this though,

> "Didn't take long. Only about 50x longer than it would have taken Claude to do it."

I'm never writing code by hand again. I stopped in February.

Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements.

So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.

It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)

Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.

Hitchcock made "Psycho".

Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".

While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.

You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.

Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.

All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.

Software can (and will) be like that too.

Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.

I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.

Future people will look back on this transitional time with curiosity. This is all going to be a non-issue in time.

The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.

Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."

And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.

    Canon mountaintop photography : smartphone selfies :: Quality AI art and software : ChatGPT Miyazaki cartoons

Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".

Nobody will bicker about "created", either.

If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".

I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.

People seem to be downvoting you because they don't want it to be this way, but I feel you're absolutely correct and this in inevitable. No matter how we - 2026 - feel about it, this will be the norm for future generations.

I just watched The Odyssey this evening. Loved it! These stories were passed down in song over thousands of years. Humanity scale type stuff. Thousands of years of spoken and written language based connections.

And it’s all survived. Durable.

So I just sit here and think and laugh wow the ego on us. Call me aged out but im not so sure that your vibe coded app or that tik tok upload is gonna hit the same in 5080.

> Call me aged out but im not so sure that your vibe coded app or that tik tok upload is gonna hit the same in 5080.

This is true of almost anything: past, present, or future. Most of everything is shit.

We know it's not inevitable because people are sticklers about the process of creation today.

People claim certain artists work is uninteresting because they didn't paint or sculpt it themselves but instead acted as more of a creative director.

People claim The Odyssey has more value because its physical effects and uses film not digital.

People claim digital art/digital photography isn't real art/photography still.

It's not an insignificant number of people but yeah it's definitely not everyone too but there are definitely ones born way after the argument was already settled on a lot of these things and still argue it. Will be mostly interesting to see how children today think about the value and ownership of education, knowledge, art, etc in a world where they're completely devalued and democratized and if they still have people who think it's not art if you didn't paint it and it's not your work if you didn't think it.

> Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".

Uh, yeah, because there's nothing to bicker about in the definition of a photograph itself. But people absolutely do not view photographers the same way they view illustrators. Nobody would ever, in a million years, consider you an artist because you snapped a selfie. You also don't "make" a photograph, you "take" a photograph (and this kind of distinction exists in every language I speak). You really couldn't have introduced a better example to defeat your own point.

Photographs now are presented in museums as work of art, and their creators are considered as artists.

And me skribbling an illustration on a piece of paper doesn’t make me an artist the same way taking a selfie doesn’t make me an artist.

That shows that something being art and someone being an artist has nothing to do with the medium and the used tools.

Photographs presented as works of art have something about the choice of what and how to photograph that is artistic. I can't just, like, take a photo of my leg and call it art. At least not without writing a thought-provoking blurb about is a photo of a leg really art? Then it becomes artistic parody, like the toilet sculpture.

>> 'Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"'

I googled that to check, and on first few pages no one said that they did? It was always "the team made".

Mark Zuckerberg for sure made "Meta" – whatever it is – at least into the joke it is today, but that's beside the point. Meta isn't a product, it's a company

No, product managers do not get to claim they made something.

They led a team that made something.

What about movie directors? Aren't they celebrated as creative geniuses? They're also just leading a team.

A property developer is the other real-world example which comes to my mind.

Architects and civil engineers don't physically build the infrastructure they design.

As a programmer I wrote my app TheseusA by hand. As a product manager I vibe-coded my other app TheseusB. Then I had my LLM port TheseusA to Python, while I ported TheseusB to Python by hand and deleted the original codebases.

Do I get to claim I made the Python TheseusA, or TheseusB, or neither or both?

Let me correct this then: "Do product managers get to claim that they helped to make something?"

I think product managers surely have a right to claim they "helped" to make something at least. If the team made something then those who work on the team all assisted in "making" the thing.

Ok, forget about the restaurant then. If I hire a private chef to make any food I want, do I get to claim that I made the food?

How do people imagine the process of creating software with AI? Tell it “I need an app where I can send images to friends” and accept the first result?

In your analogy, what I’m talking about is more like talking to a chef with the idea of a novel recipe and describing the ingredients and how you would like it to taste (of course also accepting suggestions).

I would take more pride in that meal than in a standard burger I completely cooked myself - maybe because I know I am able to prepare a great tasting burger and already did so many times. OTOH if this would be the first burger I made in my life I would be immensely proud of it.

> How do people imagine the process of creating software with AI? Tell it “I need an app where I can send images to friends” and accept the first result?

Unironically, this is some of the software being shared. Maybe a couple more back and fourths, but not much more. I know I "made" a simple discord bot that periodically checked a webpage for updates and sends me a message when there are changes. It was basically just "I want a discord bot that checks this webpage and messages me when X, Y, or Z". I only looked at the code slightly to know that the entire thing passes around loosely structured strings everywhere and checks for substrings over and over again for logic flow.

You know Gaudí? He was a great architect, and made great constructions visited by millions, like Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, or la Sagrada Familia.

To be fair he didn't place a single stone, and la Sagrada Familia was finished long after his death.

So yes, I believe you can make products using LLMs.

If there is a line, it's definitely between "I designed the architecture, and decided on what each class should do, before letting AI do a single line" and "I told AI to clone twitter as is".

Although the latter could be akin to kids colouring books. "I made AI clone twitter, but painted it red and called it rettiw." As long as there was some decision or a modicum of effort it's "ok". We can let them have their victories and try again.

>> He was a great architect, and made great constructions

He designed them. If you can find any book that claims Gaudi made them, I will personally send you 5$ for an isbn

But that wouldn't happen, because any editor would catch that mistake easily. It's not how language works, and it never was

TL;DR If you want to be a nitpicker and choose overly precise verbs almost no one is a maker.

I will not be looking for books, and probably "made" is a bit too informal to be used in any kind of "formal" conversation, and as I'm not an English native I might be using false friends, but there's another synonym used by Unesco referring to his works [0]

> Works of Antoni Gaudí > > Seven properties built by the architect Antoni Gaudí [...]

So yes, if you want to be overly precise he will not have "made" or "built" any of his buildings. OTOH you have to stop that simile somewhere, as otherwise people who compile their programs might not be the ones that "made" the executable, they just wrote the code.

[0] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/320

This is why I like to draw a distinction between design, fabrication, and assembly. "Make" is too generic a word to convey what role you actually had in the creation of something, if you're actually trying to be precise. You can fabricate something with CNC tooling that someone else designed, and that can be its own quite substantial challenge, but it's a different challenge than that of the design. And you can assemble your own bookcase from the flatpack Ikea shipped you, but that's different than fabricating the flatpack in the first place.

You made a decision to order a cheeseburger and the cook wouldn't have made it without you ordering it, so you both played a part in making the cheeseburger.

I disagree with this line of reasoning. To the same extent, I could say that you did not make an app because you didn’t write the compiled assembly code, build the processor, make the silicone yourself, etc.

Tools are tools. Same as Photoshop, Ableton, they get you to where you want to go.

Where is the line drawn?

When you create a work using a tool, you own the copyright.

When you create a work using an LLM, there is no copyright.

So then isn't an LLM less than a tool?

This is not correct and a common misunderstanding of the court ruling. The verbatim output of an LLM is not copyrightable. If you create a work using an LLM, this IS of course copyrightable.

When "using an LLM", means the human has to substantially alter the output of the LLM for the work to be eligible for copyright. Agreed.

But this makes the LLM tool different to other tools. If I author a novel using a word processor I don't then in addition have to substantially alter that output in order for the work to qualify for copyright.

[edit] It's like, how substantive would changes to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter need to to be in order for a derivative work to qualify for copyright? Now apply that to the output of an LLM.

No, the court case you’re thinking of was when someone tried to say the AI itself had the copyright ownership. That’s not allowed (at least in the US), the copyright owner must always be a human. This doesn’t mean that a human cannot copyright AI-directed works.

Silicone: rubbery, used for kitchen utensils and breast implants

Silicon: Metallic, used for making circuit components

Oops.

Interesting. I'm not sure if I'm on one side of this or the other.

I enjoy cooking. I grab a recipe and start gathering ingredients and prep them and then cook them. The food usually turns out really good (I have a lot of practice, you see, I'm getting up in age and I've done this for a log time). So, the question is, am I any less of a cook because I follow someone else's recipe instead of writing my own? To make this even more interesting, I was cooking for some friends some years ago, and one said the food was great. The other mentioned well, it must have been a good recipe. I have to admit that stung a bit. They didn't mean it that way though.

I'm rambling, but the question is, at what point is something _your_ work?

Seems to me that is what it means to be a cook. If you make food or you make recipes, you can be proud of what you did. If you want to create recipes from scratch, that's an increased level of risk, but if you're a good cook, maybe you can apply your taste and come up with a new concoction that your friends love, whether someone else has done it already or not.

Seems also pretty similar to carpentry. My grandfather assembled his cabin from a kit but modified it to taste, making it his own; he built it but did not create it as a whole. He did however create the deck that's affixed to the cabin, and his shed, by measuring out the basic dimensions, cutting and planing all the wood, maintaining it for decades, attaching doors etc..

When I made a document rendering system at my last company, I was proud to have made the system, but I did not make the all of the technology within it, and that seems like a fair distinction. The tools are part of the process of making, but if you are no longer using tools directly, you haven't really made much.

If you've made a bot that plays a game for you, you don't get to say you're playing the game, and if you haven't prepared any ingredients for a meal, you haven't made a meal

So you did not build a wardrobe unless you cut, dried and sliced your tree yourself, and used muscle powered tools.

Power tools or buying kiln-dried planks is forbidden, you might as well go to IKEA, buy you set and claim you "built" it.

You cannot also claim you built a custom sensor for your smart home if you based it on ESP32 and any of the ecosystem tooling. You might as well buy it from Phillips or Siemens if it exists, or just sit in the corner and sulk. Using advanced tools is forbidden.

I swear luddites are going more and more extreme in their analogies.

No, that is not what GP said. That is, in fact, the opposite of what GP said.

That's pretty much what they said: unless you "make" something, preferably by hand and without using advanced tools, maybe you didn't make it at all.

They were using restaurant and customised burger example to refute the claim that using LLM to assist with building solutions (applications) is building and making.

I only dialed their extreme to the further extreme, just on the adjacent plane.

no that's literally not what they said. Read again.

'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' -- Carl Sagan

I don't think the "would not exist if I hadn't created it" argument really works. If I delegate a project to someone else, and they do the project, does that mean I did it? In my mind, I could comfortably say I managed it, or I designed some parts of it, but I really couldn't take the credit for actually doing it. You wanted it to be done, so you asked someone to do it.

If anything, I would say your conclusion should be flipped: you didn't really do the "making," but you can still be proud of what you _did_ do: provide direction and a vision for a solution to a problem.

What about a director of a movie. They aren't responsible for the creative performances but they are certainly given a heap of credit for having made the movie.

I ask 10 actors for 10 scenes and I combine them into a movie I wanted.

I ask 10 agents for 10 functions and I combine them into a program I wanted.

What's the difference and why is the guy who used agents not credited the same way as a director? Maybe all that's missing is a long list of credits for everyone involved -- so transparency in who did what?

10 agents for 10 function sounds like IT director. I see enterprises are full of those and they are getting credited appropriately for "AI led innovation" at workplace.

The difference with Movie director at least is in details. IT director most likely does not care about Python, bash, js, mermaid, performance characteristics and so many other things that AI agent might have used to solve the problem. The user of these AI innovation are not having much say. They are not going to be voting with their wallet or feet.

For movie director the details of process matters a lot. Unless of course I am shooting 2 min video on my Motorola phone, while my kid is cutting her birthday cake, and call myself a movie director while doing it.

So you're saying the difference is just in how many details are specified or how deeply the director cares about the details?

i.e. if you have a DSLR and you point it at a subject and press the shutter button, that doesn't make you a "photographer"; but if you do the same while adjusting all the knobs and such using knowledge from your brain to get an intended result, that's what makes you a "photographer", despite in both cases the camera is doing the same amount of work?

So in the AI prompting case, if you send out a prompt to "clone twitter", that doesn't make you a "software director" (or whatever we might call it); but if you do the same while specifying the system topology, the various transport protocols, the implementation language, the database schema, then you might be a "software director".

Is that what you're saying?

It's the level of effort and involvement (also if you listen to any director talk they will never say "I made", they will say "we made"). Similarly to AI, nobody gives credit to the guy who "thought of the idea for the movie", they give credit to the leadership of the movie who worked alongside the crew. Directors dont just give an outline of a movie and then step away from set, they put real effort in to every aspect.

> Directors dont just give an outline of a movie and then step away from set

But I don't think people using AI to write software give an outline of the software and then just step away? It seems like a very iterative process to me with a number of decisions on the order of those needed to be made by a director of a movie.

The level of effort is minimal. It's not a quantitative definition, its qualitative. Also absolutely in no way shape or form is it anywhere near the level of decision making of a director. Your average director of some low budget B netflix slop is still making thousands of decisions per day, organizing teams, reading and writing documents, going over shot review with DP's. A director is the CEO of a film production, not some ideas guy. They require and utilize a technical understanding of all parts of the production.

The effort can be minimal but there’s a gradient as far as I can tell. At one extreme is what you said: write a prompt and walk away. At the other end you could actually instruct the agent to write every character of the program, and that would be more effort than typing it out yourself. Then there’s the in-between state of writing half and letting the agent fill in the other half. People are using it at all levels of effort, I don’t see how you can presume everyone uses the minimum level.

You're honest, but you'd make a terrible CEO in this day and age.

Those two qualities tend to go hand in hand

To me there is a difference that lies in the words. E.g. `making` and `producing` both result in the creation of something, but `making` has a more active part while `producing` has a more supervisory part.

This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.

To me, the idea is that you have something in your head and you want to "project" it into reality. I suppose the difference between makers and producers then is that makers happen to enjoy the labor part of that projection, while producers don't particularly care about it (nor want to care).

But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now. The real discussion does not seem to be about words though but about value. If you find vibe-coded software worthless, you value the process and work that went into it more than the finished end product. I can fully understand this. But it’s just not the way I feel about it.

> But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now.

This is what communication is. Words are representations for whatever it is that we're talking about. There is no other way.

Agree with you on what we're talking about, disagree on the stance. It's a discussion of value yes. vibe-coded software has less "I made this" value but still holds "does this have utility" value. They're different. Making things with AI is its own kind of making, but it is not the same kind of making as baking a cake from scratch, building a doghouse, or planting your own garden.

"Produce" is a good verb. "Direct", too, if it's a creative work and you give close instructions and make judgements calls. "Design" is accurate if you prompt with an idea about the form of what you want.

"Make" gets confusing for AI-assisted projects because it carries a connotation of craft. It seems fully justified for a code project that is 90% you, 10% AI (you'd say you made something that was 90% you, 10% human help) and misleading for a project that is 90% AI, 10% you (unless the meaning of the word shifts).

Here is a relevant comment I wrote in a thread about AI art (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705952#46708186):

>> If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."

> "Art director" seems accurate for what a skillful user of art generators with a specific vision does.

> I have also thought that since people find "director" lofty (thanks to auteur theory?) and therefore pretentious to assume, one could borrow "producer" from Vocaloid: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Producer (alternative front end: https://antifandom.com/vocaloid/wiki/Producer).

> I find "make" potentially confusing with AI-assisted projects.

I'm feeling this right now. I have a working prototype of a project that has mirrors mounted on pan/tilt mechanisms driven by servos and controlled by an Arduino. I modeled the mirror mechanisms myself in OpenSCAD and 3D printed them, I laid out the wiring from my head, I assembled everything by hand. But I got Codex to write the Arduino code that uses a GPS module to get the location and time, calculates the sun position, and (with some manual calibration) aims the mirrors to beam sunlight 'pixels' in an x/z grid on the wall.

It works. But for some reason it's profoundly unsatisfying. I'm very unlikely to go from this 4 mirror prototype to the original dream of a James Web Space Telescope model in my courtyard with 18 steerable mirrors drawing low res 1 bit pixel art on my dining room wall.

Plenty of comments already. "I made this" is a reserved concept for one's hands being in the clay. It's different. It is its own experience. And it is different from any other approach toward the end result. That's it.

I think this is some of the most interesting revelation to come about during these times: there seems to be two kinds of people – those for whom the act doing something well has the highest inherent value, and those for whom accomplishing well has the highest inherent value.

This of course doesn't mean the former group doesn't care about the outcome, or that the latter group does poor work. But the dichotomy seems very real. We've had conversations at work where the room splits in two and both sides struggle to grasp how the other side can possibly feel that way. Everyone involved respects eachothers' skills, but we've never known about this fundamental schism until now, and it's like discovering that half your coworkers are aliens.

> I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM

You didn't make it

An LLM doesn't do anything on its own. One needs to make the choice to build something, make choices about how it's built, and make decisions on how it should work. The LLM makes the output of those decisions, but in the end it's just one of the tools that was used to make a part of the system that was built.

In my head "make" implies copyright. If you make it then copyright belongs to you unless you sign that away.

You prompted, the LLM made. The output of the LLM is not eligible for copyright.

You can perhaps copyright the prompt. That you did make.

When Claude Code/Codex first came about I'll admit it depressed me a bit, but I ended up realizing that the "code" part wasn't the part that I actually enjoyed about software engineering.

Instead, what I've been doing for my personal projects has been about designing algorithms with TLA+. I write that by hand, model check and sometimes even prove the properties I think are interesting or useful, and then tell Claude to implement it based on the spec. Usually I still need to correct the generated code but it's a lot less.

Certainly in these cases, I take pride in what I did, because ultimately the "Invisible Hand" always means I'm outsourcing some of the work of a project no matter how involved I want to be. If I build a deck outside, I'm not forging the nails myself, I'm not growing and chopping down the trees for lumber, I'm not designing my own power tools, etc. There's always a level of outsourcing of the work that I don't find interesting or that I don't know how to do, or don't have the resources to do myself.

With software, the parts that I end up feeling proudest of, and this predates widespread use of LLMs, are the algorithms and tricks I come up with to build something. When I figure out a way to avoid a lock, or figure out a way to use less memory, or figure out a way to increase throughput, I'm less concerned with the actual "code", and much more concerned about the "how".

I completely agree with you, because I usually think the same way and I'm more concerned with the result than the path taken to achieve it. But you shouldn't forget that there are definitely people who work the exact opposite way. They don't care at all about having something functional in their hands at the end, because they just enjoy the process of building. And as soon as it's finished, they tear it all down anyway just to start over again with a different approach.

Seems pretty simple in your analogy.

You can be proud of having commissioned a thing… be it landscaping or software… just not for making anything you didn’t.

And of course there are shades of grey in between, depending on how critical you were to the doing.

There is a missing word. "Make" is too loose and people disagree that it applies because they disagree on the base meaning of the word. "Commission" is much closer to what is happening, but I am not sure it is it. "Vibe-Coded" tries and fails to fill the niche.

> coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product

I think that's the main difference. For many of us, the process and how we grow through that process really is as important as, if not more important than, the result

> but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it

You did NOT make the software that you generated with AI. But there's nothing wrong with you feeling proud of initiating it. If anyone tells you that you shouldn't feel proud of the prompting you did, please just ignore that person.

In your examples, you didn’t “make” anything. The person whose work trained the LLM made the work. The landscaper made the lawn. I don’t know how it’s possible to take pride in doing nothing.

I can hire a maid to make my bed for me and tell her how exactly to fluff my pillows and duvet but I would take no pride in that.

Let’s not argue about the meaning of “making”, but that’s a very limited view of how value is created. So in your view the producer or even the director of a movie cannot take pride in it because the actors are the ones doing the work?

you can take pride in it, definitely added value and also acknowledge that an actor turned director (to keep the metaphor going) may have different feelings about the process even if they are happy with the end result similarly a coder turned manager or director may have some internal struggle with not actually doing the coding anymore -- similar to how one might feel having made a product or feature entirely with AI coding

Article does take a stance on the term "making" vs "having a hand in creation" fwiw. I guess the latter doesn't have a great term yet which is why an argument over the term making is sincere

A large part of how actors act is specific cues given to them by the director, which is pretty clearly work by the director. A director also gives specific instructions for a lot of other things that have a noticeable impact on the resulting value of the movie.

That's different from telling a maid to generally clean your home. If you gave a maid specific instructions on how to clean and how to move things around in a way that made a noticeable impact on how clean your house ended up being, you could be proud of the managerial work you're doing. But no one does that, because people pay money to not have to work.

Likewise, if you just told an LLM to let it rip on a general task then you're not doing much work, but if you were managing the LLM to do specific things then you are doing significant work.

Your compiler created the bytecode that the CPU runs. How can you take pride in writing your Rust code?

That point was specifically addressed in the article.

Given that a compiler doesn't include a statistical model likely to create one's written Rust code, the compiled bytecode is quite clearly an expression of said writing.

How can you take pride in writing a novel when it’s Notepad and Windows that is translating keystrokes to letters?

If you go to a coffee shop and ask for extra ice, whole milk, double espresso latte - did you make the coffee or did the Barista make it. You gave him some specific directions didn’t you?

It’s the same with LLMs.

> I don’t know how it’s possible to take pride in doing nothing.

Aw, now I feel sad for you. It's definitely possible, and I do it every weekend.

I wish I could know that feeling

I can relate to and sympathize with time constraints and convenience arguments, but I think it’s more accurate in both the landscaping and app examples to say it wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t _asked/paid_ for it.

And you could have made it and then you could have been proud of it. And at least some of time, that’s more valuable than an unspecified “product”. I’m more attached to things I made than things I bought.

Many people have a disillusion that an LLM is something more than a tool.

Git is also a tool, but cloning a repo does not means I created the software.

Exactly. It also doesn't obscure the original property rights or licensing, nor can it be done without permission of the owner.

The LLM crowd just loves the idea that all tools are equivalent with the same set primary-, secondary-, and side-effects, a false claim used as low-effort universal self-absolution.

Cool, you can also use a 3D printer/lathe/CNC machine to clone a mechanical patented physical item. Plagiary can be done with any existing tool/method, you don't need an LLM for that.

If all you care about is the end product and not how it's made, then you never become a better person. Your capacity for thinking and solving problems will never grow. You will never be an expert. Experts care about the process.

Of course, you may not care, and that's fine. It's important that people not be delusional about this though. A person with no medical knowledge and an AI will never be as good as someone with prodigious medical knowledge and an AI. The same is true for any profession, whether programming, music, writing, etc.

Of course. But I have been programming for over 30 years and I know that I cannot be an expert for everything. Besides that, maybe my capacity for thinking won’t grow anymore. But my capacity for solving problems just exploded in the last few years thanks to AI.

But you didn’t solve anything. AI solved it.

If you go to a coffee shop and ask extra ice, less sugar, more vanilla - did you make the coffee or the barista make the coffe and you just gave some requests to him. Using an LLM is far more similar to ordering coffee from a barista than it is to actually making the coffee. Of course the barista didn’t make the seeds, the milk etc. This is not an exact lawyerly statement.

But intuitively, you didn’t make anything when Claude Code writes all your code.

Why do you think using AI to write code is like ordering a coffee? They don't seem very similar to me so I'm curious how you see them as similar.

If an expert barista goes to a coffee shop and orders a coffee, do they get a better quality coffee?

Because it's a common experience of folks using LLMs to code (and other activities) that experts get better results than non-experts.

So it definitely suggests that the human is part of the making process, not just the recipient of the finished product as in your coffee example.

yes, they would, they still didnt make the coffee though. They would likely get banned from said coffee shop if they then went around the room claiming they made the coffee.

No, they wouldn't. An expert barista gets served the same coffee as everyone else, obviously. The analogy is bad for this reason.

No. That's the misunderstanding.

You are right, I did not solve the problem "how do I need to layout the editor so the chords appear directly above the correct bar".

I definitely solved the problem "I don't have a tool to quickly create guitar tabulature that I can use on my iPad"

Just like those Southern plantation owners were so proud of all the things they “made” with slave labor.

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