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