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Making

beej.us

191–194 of 194 posts

Re: Making

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an expert barista goes to a coffee shop and orders a coffee, do they get a better quality coffee? Because it's a common experience of folks using LLMs to code (and other activities) that experts get better results than non-experts. So it definitely suggests that the human is part of the making process, not just the recipient of the finished product as in your coffee example.

yes, they would, they still didnt make the coffee though. They would likely get banned from said coffee shop if they then went around the room claiming they made the coffee.

No, they wouldn't. An expert barista gets served the same coffee as everyone else, obviously. The analogy is bad for this reason.

Re: Making

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know Gaudí? He was a great architect, and made great constructions visited by millions, like Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, or la Sagrada Familia. To be fair he didn't place a single stone, and la Sagrada Familia was finished long after his death. So yes, I believe you can make products using LLMs. If there is a line, it's definitely between "I designed the architecture, and decided on what each class should do, before…

>> He was a great architect, and made great constructions He designed them. If you can find any book that claims Gaudi made them, I will personally send you 5$ for an isbn But that wouldn't happen, because any editor would catch that mistake easily. It's not how language works, and it never was

TL;DR If you want to be a nitpicker and choose overly precise verbs almost no one is a maker.

I will not be looking for books, and probably "made" is a bit too informal to be used in any kind of "formal" conversation, and as I'm not an English native I might be using false friends, but there's another synonym used by Unesco referring to his works [0]

> Works of Antoni Gaudí > > Seven properties built by the architect Antoni Gaudí [...]

So yes, if you want to be overly precise he will not have "made" or "built" any of his buildings. OTOH you have to stop that simile somewhere, as otherwise people who compile their programs might not be the ones that "made" the executable, they just wrote the code.

[0] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/320

Re: Making

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Directors dont just give an outline of a movie and then step away from set But I don't think people using AI to write software give an outline of the software and then just step away? It seems like a very iterative process to me with a number of decisions on the order of those needed to be made by a director of a movie.

The level of effort is minimal. It's not a quantitative definition, its qualitative. Also absolutely in no way shape or form is it anywhere near the level of decision making of a director. Your average director of some low budget B netflix slop is still making thousands of decisions per day, organizing teams, reading and writing documents, going over shot review with DP's. A director is the CEO of a film production,…

The effort can be minimal but there’s a gradient as far as I can tell. At one extreme is what you said: write a prompt and walk away. At the other end you could actually instruct the agent to write every character of the program, and that would be more effort than typing it out yourself. Then there’s the in-between state of writing half and letting the agent fill in the other half. People are using it at all levels of effort, I don’t see how you can presume everyone uses the minimum level.

Re: Making

#194

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…

There's a word for what you're doing there: equivocation. > A director "makes" movies. You clearly don't appreciate what that means. It's a deeply creative and involved process, not just waving a film into being with their flapping arms. Moreover, there are dozens to hundreds (or more!) people working as a team on everything from sets to cameras to post-production to ... When we say a director "made" that movie, we d…

dont worry man it was a joke
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