91–100 of 194 posts
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.
It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)
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…
I feel the same way if the agent moves too quickly. If I ask for a feature in high-level language the LLM will make many guesses and assumptions to carry that out. I don't feel like I'm involved in the creation of that software at all. It feels more like running a find and replace on someone else's code to make it to what I want.
That's why I instruct the LLM at a low level, that is at the level of the code itself. I'll ask for refactors, I'll ask for a new class etc. This cuts down on time spent typing while I still remain on top of the code.
At least that's the idea. But there's still a problem. LLMs are trained to want to write working code. If what you asked for won't work, it'll just fill in the blanks and guess to make it work. And then you don't feel like you made it again.
Basically, we kid ourselves into thinking it's just a supercharged text editor that we control, but it's actually an LLM that just doesn't work that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM You didn't make it
An LLM doesn't do anything on its own. One needs to make the choice to build something, make choices about how it's built, and make decisions on how it should work. The LLM makes the output of those decisions, but in the end it's just one of the tools that was used to make a part of the system that was built.
You prompted, the LLM made. The output of the LLM is not eligible for copyright.
You can perhaps copyright the prompt. That you did make.
One side of it is the advent of open-weights models. This alleviates part of my fears, fears of my free software and open-source tools being made irrelevant by black-box machines built by American corporations that absorb infinite capital, with capital gaining infinite power against labour.
But the other side, is that I am slowly witnessing how LLM's are not diminishing my value as a software engineer, more on the contrary. I see the outcome of projects that are vibe-coded to oblivion, immediately turning into unmaintainable messes no matter how many tokens you drop into them. Architectural insight, establishing proper processes, properly trading off features, applying engineering restrain, are more important than ever. I see my influence in projects even more crucial than before. Furthermore, the skills that I gained by sculpting code with my bare hands are only gonna become more and more rare, as I belong to one of the last generations that wrote code on their own.
I realized this weekend that a good analogy, is that we are like airplane pilots. Modern commercial planes run mostly on auto-pilot; the job of the pilot is nonetheless of uttermost importance, and is remunerated accordingly. We are code pilots with auto-pilot for code, and because of that a small team can build systems with levels of complexity before unimaginable used by thousands or millions of users, and for this reason, our responsibility and impact on projects is greater than ever.
I do miss some of the craft. As others wrote here, I can visualize in my head codebases I wrote even two decades ago, I even remember the color scheme of the editor I used for them. This won't happen with the code of the new era. I miss hand-optimizing a clever algorithm, designing elegant abstractions using rare language features, obsessing about a crucial piece of code. I worry about some of my brainpower atrophying. But maybe, if I open my heart to it, there will be good things that come on the other end of all this crazy time. Even if I sometimes feel like I am "just" a manager now, if I look closely, I can notice how I am still an engineer, perhaps, more than ever. And with my intelligence I can build great things, perhaps, greater than ever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements. So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's…
Hitchcock made "Psycho".
Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".
While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.
You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.
Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.
All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.
Software can (and will) be like that too.
Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.
We continue to grapple with AI and how it's impacting our lives by trying to find comfort in comparisons to the past, or to other things that we do. But the reality is, there's never been anything quite like this before, and it's forcing us to redefine how we value work, art, craftsmanship, and output. Sometimes, those redefinitions are extremely uncomfortable.
How does this even contribute to the content posted? The only thing being "redefined" is corporate agendas to push the bar of "good enough" lower to the point where it lies below cheap, and equals wasteful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements. So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's…
Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision. Hitchcock made "Psycho". Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke". While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces. You can tel…
Beej's writing always impresses me.