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...

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.

Instead of saying "create instructions for CNC to make me a _thing_, then instruct the CNC machine to actually create the _thing_" they went and created the instructions themselves.

Yes. The CNC doesn't act on its own.

If I ask the CNC "make me a widget", am I a machinist?