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Comment by InitialBP | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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