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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

The role is "producer" and it's a valid and influential role, even if it's not directly creative. Producers decide what to focus on, raise the money, and put together the principals. As an actor or director you may not like working with them, but you can't deny their importance.

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You walk into a food factory and you ask for a pizza. It comes out and you tell them that you wanted mushrooms, so they make another one. It arrives and you complain that it's square and not round, so they make another one. That one has no tomato sauce so you send it back again. Eventually you get the pizza you want.

I make my own pizza because I like doing it. And if I can't be bothered to make one, I'll just pick a ready made one off a menu from a pizza restaurant.

You then decide to ask it to vary the unbleached:white flour ratio. You ask it to suggest flavor combinations based on 14th century english cookbooks. What happens if the dough is knead it for 3 minutes? 30? Substitute the water for oil and egg whites?

You ask it to try putting the mushroom in the pizza dough. What about cauliflower? What if the tomato sauce / cheese / mushroom order is changed? What if I add the vegetables in a second cooking step?

You're not a cook, but I'd say that at a certain point you might be considered a head chef in this example.

Doing something for fun is all well and good if that's the goal. Finding the best pizza dough recipe doesn't actually need you to get your hands in the dough if you can get the AI to do it for you. That's no different to delegating it to a subordinate cook.

You don't write in assembly. Or, probably, C. You don't write your own graphics driver, or GUI toolkit, or OS kernel, or typeface...We're all just climbing the abstraction tower. It's just that AI is a larger jump than most.

You still didn't make it.

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" -- Carl Sagan

And you didn't mill your own flour for the pizza you supposedly made from scratch.

Oh, you did? But did you grow your own wheat out back?

Don't be obtuse. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.

I didn't write the compiler but I did make the pizza.

This is definitely not being obtuse. It's keeping discussions around what we actually achieve as humans in the bounds of reality, not within the bounds of marketing and ego.

You claim not to be obtuse yet you still haven't responded to the point that's now been presented in multiple ways.

If I use unity did I write my own game? What about a framework such as bgfx? Or am I required to write my own calls to standardized 3D APIs?

The important detail isn't what was and wasn't pre-made (there will pretty much always be something that was pre-made) but rather the list of contributions by the individual. If I use tomato sauce from a can and a frozen crust you might or might not be impressed by the pizza that I "made" depending on how far I went beyond that starting point.

> "If I use unity did I write my own game?"

That example works against you: people deride "asset flip" games all the time where no creative effort was put into the game and it's just the engine and stock assets wired together with only sample gameplay code.

I'm not sure what point you think I'm trying to make because that doesn't work against me at all.

> The important detail isn't what was and wasn't pre-made ... but rather the list of contributions by the individual.

A “producer” is just flattering terminology for a product owner.

I was happy to have a good product owner.

But these posts are trying to gain plaudits for their technical skills and hard work.

When in fact they owned the product, rather than demonstrated the hard work and dedication of years past.

I mean I’m happy to congratulate the agents they used. Phwoar, look at those weights. Impressive!

> But these posts are trying to gain plaudits for their technical skills and hard work.

Playing devil's advocate, AI is now standard tooling for any CS adjacent engineering discipline. The question then (IMO) is how this compares to what someone else would accomplish with the same or similar tools.

I can spend years learning music theory and the piano to perform a nice sounding piece, or I can press the “demo” button on an electronic keyboard to produce a nice sounding piece.

I’ve accomplished the same end result with the demo button—in fact it may sound nicer. Is pressing the demo button more impressive?

You've ignored my point entirely. The question is how much others would accomplish given the same or substantially similar set of tools. The demo button in your example isn't technically impressive because the "operator" hasn't done much of anything. But importantly that doesn't mean you can't do impressive things with a midi tracker.

People regularly do impressive things with LLMs. Somewhat more commonly, they do unimpressive things with them.

If you view the demo button as a tool then you’ve used a tool to achieve the same result

Essentially, I admire lengthy effort and dedication and how that sharpens your intellect. It’s hard for me to admire people who have bypassed that.

Yes exactly. My point is that using an LLM doesn't inherently mean bypassing that. Just that a lot of people use it that way.

Nah. You either are like Rick Rubin or you're not producing anything

I feel more like an orchestrator when vibe coding than a developer, I'm telling each part what I want from them, judging them on results, and ensuring each part runs at the right time with the right lead in

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