Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making

beej.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 194 posts

Re: Making

#81

Post by avilay »

I have been grappling with a similar sentiment for a while now. I hate to think of myself as a Luddite, but I love the act of writing code. A blank VS Code in front of me is a beautiful sight full of wonder and possibilities :-) Here is how I rationalize the two - the pride and satisfaction I get from my work depends on how much effort I put in applying some previously acquired specialist knowledge, which itself took some decent amount of effort to acquire. This is why a beginner programmer is just as proud of their temperature convertor as a professional distributed systems engineer of their new 2PC module.

A quote that I read somewhere, possibly by Naval Ravikant, strikes at the heart of this - "a creation without a (human) creator is meaningless".

Re: Making

#82

Post by apsurd »

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…

Plenty of comments already. "I made this" is a reserved concept for one's hands being in the clay. It's different. It is its own experience. And it is different from any other approach toward the end result. That's it.

Re: Making

#83

Post by stronglikedan »

wlesieutre wrote: post #53
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…

> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it. So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it. To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandw…

You made a decision to order a cheeseburger and the cook wouldn't have made it without you ordering it, so you both played a part in making the cheeseburger.

Re: Making

#84

Post by beej71 »

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?

I think this gets to one of the important points which is we tend to view a hammer as a tool (an extension of ourselves), but we don't tend to view our direct reports as such.

There's a line there somewhere that gets crossed.

Part of it has to do with direct one-to-one determinism. I pull that lever, the excavator bucket pulls up a ton of earth. There was no extra decision made in the middle. And it was completely reproducible.

We might even go so far as to say, "I moved a ton of earth." Even though it was the backhoe that did it.

Back to CNC, consider the manager who orders the machinist to use the CNC to make a widget. Does the manager qualify as a machinist?

I think most people would say, "No. Not unless he coincidentally was one."

There's another person in the middle in that case. That level of indirection is somehow making the manager not a machinist.

I speculate it has something to do with the fact that the machinist in the middle is an independent being that holds knowledge to make things go. The manager gives a very high-level instruction and doesn't instruct the machinist on how to do it.

And I think LLMs are starting to feel (to folks like me) a bit like that machinist. They're not deterministic like the backhoe and the compiler. And they seem human, convoluting the matter further still.

Re: Making

#85

Post by apsurd »

planb wrote: post #34
Zolomon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now. The real discussion does not seem to be about words though but about value. If you find vibe-coded software worthless, you value the process and work that went into it more than the finished end product. I can fully understand this. But it’s just not the way I feel about it.

> But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now.

This is what communication is. Words are representations for whatever it is that we're talking about. There is no other way.

Agree with you on what we're talking about, disagree on the stance. It's a discussion of value yes. vibe-coded software has less "I made this" value but still holds "does this have utility" value. They're different. Making things with AI is its own kind of making, but it is not the same kind of making as baking a cake from scratch, building a doghouse, or planting your own garden.

Re: Making

#86

Post by haickernews »

This article has a narrow view of "making" which is stuck hopelessly in the past, in my honest opinion. A human in the loop guiding the process is 100% making something, no matter how much you torture the definition of "make."

When I write software with Claude, I'm the one with the agency, not Claude. Without me, the software wouldn't even exist. A director "makes" movies. A collage artist "makes" images. A fisherman "makes" a catch. Someone searching YouTube and clicking on a video "makes" a video. These are widely agreed upon definitions, so it should not be controversial to say you "make" software with LLMs.

Re: Making

#87

Post by echelon »

InitialBP wrote: post #55
wlesieutre wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it. So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it. To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandw…

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…

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.

Re: Making

#88

Post by haickernews »

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

Complete opposite for me, and it is important you hear this. I spend $200 a month Anthropic on Claude Code uplift more free time while no boilerplate yet success and is much more fulfilling now than in the pre-agentic era of hobby coding.

Re: Making

#90

Post by liminal-dev »

wlesieutre wrote: post #53
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…

> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it. So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it. To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandw…

I disagree with this line of reasoning. To the same extent, I could say that you did not make an app because you didn’t write the compiled assembly code, build the processor, make the silicone yourself, etc.

Tools are tools. Same as Photoshop, Ableton, they get you to where you want to go.

Where is the line drawn?

Post reply on HN