Drum Machines (LLMs) Have No Soul

That said, I've gotta throw down some guantlets, ofc:

1. The implication here is that there's a binary between completely vibecoded and completely handmade, and that the latter is inherently more aesthetically valuable by definition alone (cause surely you can't prove the presence or absence of 'soul'). This is a bit unintentionally elitist IMHO; it's easy to write off an imagined slop artist turning out identical anime images for their Reddit page ad nauseum, but there's an exploding class of (somewhat-)vibecoded works of love now that agents are feasible.

2. More than that, this is missing some fundamental philosophical distinctions, the most obvious of which is the distinction between aesthetics and pragmatics. Building a little fun music app can admittedly toe the line, but I think it's obvious how the question of "soul" begins to lose appeal once you get closer to, say, writing drivers for a new keyboard or amp (?). On that end of the spectrum, the use of agents is a pragmatic decisions measured by its relative success, as guaged by all the typical stuff -- correctness, performance, complexity, maintainability, etc.

3. More particularly, I feel like LLMs let me add more "soul" than usual, speaking as a relatively experienced fullstack dev; rather than spending time on debugging the JWT flow or reading mozilla docs, you can quickly iterate on the actual rendered site in all the little attention-to-detail ways that bring an interface from functional to aesthetic. This covers direct styling stuff ofc, but also all the silly little details that are becoming ubiquitous: fun custom spinners (the new Anthropic orbital spinner is next level), animations with spring and intertia, ascii art at the top of TUIs, etc.

Not really expecting a response, as these are more musings than real challenges. Ultimately what we think about art matters little; beauty as always remains frustratingly lodged in the eye of the beholder...