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 sandwich."
It can also apply to tasks where you've offloaded a bunch of work that once would've been done by hand, like "I made this bench using a circular saw."
Where things get hairy even with physical objects is processes like CNC or 3D printers. If you download "Articulated dragon.stl" from a website and press the print button, did you make that? Personally, no. But if you designed your own flexy dragon and printed it, then yes. If you set up a relief carving on a CNC machine or do a perfectly fit inlay, are you making that? Operating these still takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill, but different knowledge and skill from hand woodworking. What if the tools improve and become very easy to operate?
I don't think there's a hard line you can draw. But if there is, it's somewhere between "did everything by hand with no assistance from recently invented tools because those are cheating" and "ordered a sandwich and waited for the finished result to show up."
Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.
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.
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)
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.
In your analogy, what I’m talking about is more like talking to a chef with the idea of a novel recipe and describing the ingredients and how you would like it to taste (of course also accepting suggestions).
I would take more pride in that meal than in a standard burger I completely cooked myself - maybe because I know I am able to prepare a great tasting burger and already did so many times. OTOH if this would be the first burger I made in my life I would be immensely proud of it.
Unironically, this is some of the software being shared. Maybe a couple more back and fourths, but not much more. I know I "made" a simple discord bot that periodically checked a webpage for updates and sends me a message when there are changes. It was basically just "I want a discord bot that checks this webpage and messages me when X, Y, or Z". I only looked at the code slightly to know that the entire thing passes around loosely structured strings everywhere and checks for substrings over and over again for logic flow.
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 letting AI do a single line" and "I told AI to clone twitter as is".
Although the latter could be akin to kids colouring books. "I made AI clone twitter, but painted it red and called it rettiw." As long as there was some decision or a modicum of effort it's "ok". We can let them have their victories and try again.
Tools are tools. Same as Photoshop, Ableton, they get you to where you want to go.
Where is the line drawn?
Instead, what I've been doing for my personal projects has been about designing algorithms with TLA+. I write that by hand, model check and sometimes even prove the properties I think are interesting or useful, and then tell Claude to implement it based on the spec. Usually I still need to correct the generated code but it's a lot less.
Certainly in these cases, I take pride in what I did, because ultimately the "Invisible Hand" always means I'm outsourcing some of the work of a project no matter how involved I want to be. If I build a deck outside, I'm not forging the nails myself, I'm not growing and chopping down the trees for lumber, I'm not designing my own power tools, etc. There's always a level of outsourcing of the work that I don't find interesting or that I don't know how to do, or don't have the resources to do myself.
With software, the parts that I end up feeling proudest of, and this predates widespread use of LLMs, are the algorithms and tricks I come up with to build something. When I figure out a way to avoid a lock, or figure out a way to use less memory, or figure out a way to increase throughput, I'm less concerned with the actual "code", and much more concerned about the "how".
If anything, I would say your conclusion should be flipped: you didn't really do the "making," but you can still be proud of what you _did_ do: provide direction and a vision for a solution to a problem.
I ask 10 actors for 10 scenes and I combine them into a movie I wanted.
I ask 10 agents for 10 functions and I combine them into a program I wanted.
What's the difference and why is the guy who used agents not credited the same way as a director? Maybe all that's missing is a long list of credits for everyone involved -- so transparency in who did what?
The difference with Movie director at least is in details. IT director most likely does not care about Python, bash, js, mermaid, performance characteristics and so many other things that AI agent might have used to solve the problem. The user of these AI innovation are not having much say. They are not going to be voting with their wallet or feet.
For movie director the details of process matters a lot. Unless of course I am shooting 2 min video on my Motorola phone, while my kid is cutting her birthday cake, and call myself a movie director while doing it.
This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.
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.
You can be proud of having commissioned a thing… be it landscaping or software… just not for making anything you didn’t.
And of course there are shades of grey in between, depending on how critical you were to the doing.
You didn't make it
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.
Of course, you may not care, and that's fine. It's important that people not be delusional about this though. A person with no medical knowledge and an AI will never be as good as someone with prodigious medical knowledge and an AI. The same is true for any profession, whether programming, music, writing, etc.
I can hire a maid to make my bed for me and tell her how exactly to fluff my pillows and duvet but I would take no pride in that.
Aw, now I feel sad for you. It's definitely possible, and I do it every weekend.
Given that a compiler doesn't include a statistical model likely to create one's written Rust code, the compiled bytecode is quite clearly an expression of said writing.
Article does take a stance on the term "making" vs "having a hand in creation" fwiw. I guess the latter doesn't have a great term yet which is why an argument over the term making is sincere
That's different from telling a maid to generally clean your home. If you gave a maid specific instructions on how to clean and how to move things around in a way that made a noticeable impact on how clean your house ended up being, you could be proud of the managerial work you're doing. But no one does that, because people pay money to not have to work.
Likewise, if you just told an LLM to let it rip on a general task then you're not doing much work, but if you were managing the LLM to do specific things then you are doing significant work.