Making • Hacker News Board

Re: Making

#21

Post by WillAdams » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #10

Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist? Is his required knowledge of metals, assembly complexity, tolerances, just waved away because he doesn't turn the dials or change the tools any more?

Depends.

To some degree, some folks esp. for "lights out" machining are just pushing buttons and loading/unloading pallets of stock/parts, but usually the job description for that is "machine operator".

A machinist is expected to understand feeds and speeds and how they interact with toolpaths and materials and tooling.

The big question of course will be how things fall out with the on-coming generation of 5-axis machines which are intended to be AI-driven:

https://toolguyd.com/new-ai-powered-desktop-cnc-machines-202...

Re: Making

#22

Post by Zolomon » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

planb wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: Making

#23

Post by RazorBucksICO » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Making

#24

Post by corysama » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

hbcdbff wrote: post #8

This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more

I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before.

Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

Re: Making

#25

Post by kretaceous » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #11

hbcdbff wrote: post #8

This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more

I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.

This is relatable. I find myself using LLMs more in cases where I don't care about learning and have made multiple tools to fir my workflow (Swift apps, etc. without ever touching Swift code). When it comes to things I do know about or want to learn about, I'm avoidant towards them because I know I can do better even if slower; but the procrastination for these has definitely turned into disinterest.

Re: Making

#26

Post by revetkn » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

Zolomon wrote: post #22

planb wrote: post #20

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…

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).

Re: Making

#27

Post by bredren » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

This goes straight to the compiler and whether that precludes original craft. But I think it would be more relevant to discuss the use of open source packages.

Because I absolutely feel I made entire SaaS products, cool ones, by hand and they sat on a multitude of packages and infra I but glued together.

For frontend, I tailored templates, and instead put energy and time into making modern frontend toolchains and Django backends work together. This was satisfying to understand and build.

Being at ease with the minute details of Django or latest flags of esbuild felt like knowing the various modes of my Dewalt or Dewalt-colored power tools.

Building with AI is not a passive activity, and doing so well and efficiently, there is a ton to master and it evolved a great deal in the past six months.

So leveraging the tools using custom skills, custom CLIs, etc this is very important and very valuable thing to do. I would classify it as a serious contemporary computer science skill that should be taught in addition to the fundamentals.

Presume now, you're making and leveraging all of the modern bells and whistles of Claude Code and Codex. That is, you're reading the release notes and you have personal tooling so you can switch between them easily.

You can build incredible things with sustainable release workflows and reasonable security and possibly more than what a solo dev's "production quality" of yore.

I know this because I had Fable look at an entirely "hand crafted" SaaS I built over two years and it found about a page of bullets just in p0-p1 that I had not caught in my artisanal best effort. They were real issues, maybe unlikely but still things that I would have fixed if I had known.

But what can not be replaced is *taste*.

You can build all day and night and if it ain't good people won't use it. If you can't describe it in a way that makes sense to people they won't care.

If you build something people don't want you've not really made anything more than we did before we had AI as a tool.

I do think it can still achieve the same level of satisfaction if it is built well. Because it actually does take a lot of skill and knowledge to make something well using agentic programming. This is regardless of whether people want it.

Re: Making

#28

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #16

layer8 wrote: post #5

> What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear. For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of…

Sounds very much like agency over the process versus agency over the outcome. Some are ok with deciding if and when the process should be started and whether the outcome is good and bad. But often they lack the judgment to truly decide what is good and what is bad. They trust the makers to provide equally good options in terms of lower concerns (that matters to the makers) and only make the judgment according to some…

[deleted]

Re: Making

#29

Post by vector_spaces » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

ge96 wrote: post #18

I'm trying to get it back. I went through a period of 2 months or so where I didn't want to do anything not even watch TV except drink. So I've been sober for a couple weeks now, think I'm starting to get it back. But I'm still lazy af right now. I miss making hardware, I design/make my own cameras and little self navigating robots. I did finally fix my camera after it rolled across the floor of my car during a tight…

I think don't be too hard on yourself. If you haven't already, it may be worth considering whether ADHD or something else might be playing a role. We aren't machines, we're messy bundles of biology and understanding our own particular messy bundle can go a long way towards getting it rolling in the right direction.

Re: Making

#30

Post by darkstarsys » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

hbcdbff wrote: post #8

This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more

Exactly the opposite for me. I've gotten into a whirlwind of productivity, working through my lifetime backlog of "somebody out to do thing X" — now I'm doing ALL of them (all open source naturally), plus parametric 3d printing, hardware projects and more.