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If your only measure of value is human labour just say that. Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance.

Obviously anyone can make anything once they've seen it implemented from someone else's idea. Maybe sometimes the idea is the value in itself, the action of taking it from zero to product is just a means to distribute the idea.

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Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself. Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify. Why do we give anyone any money? Why don't we just do everything ourselves?
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That's not really how it works, because in all your examples there is a pretty reasonable amount of work being put in that you are paying for.

Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.

A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"

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So do it. Everything AI assisted I've made has involved a ton of work. The only difference AI has made is that I've increased the level of my ambition and avoided a ton of things that were previously blockers.
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> Many AI projects are just a few prompts away

"Just a few prompts" is the new "can do that in a weekend". In reality it still takes a while to build everything, think about what features you want to have and how to prioritize them, how to build a good UX / UI, set up payment providers etc.

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>Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself.

Because growing fruits is hard.

>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.

Because playing music is hard.

This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

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> This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.

As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?

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I disagree. What might be "a few prompts in claude code" for you, could be a lot of work for someone else. Not everyone is comfortable setting up a domain name and hosting etc... and if you provide value, why not ask for something in return?
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Why do people go to restaurants and pay significantly more when they can just buy the ingredients and cook at home? Those damn chefs make my food in 15 minutes.
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Why do people go to real restaurants, with chefs who actually cook things, when they can cook at home? Possibly the quality of the food, atmosphere etc.

Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.

Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.

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Interesting division you make there, I go to both "real", higher end restaurants and "low grade" pub restaurants. For me, the the reason is the same, convenience, laziness and lack of my expertise and willingness to cook.

Obviously I can judge a place based on the quality of service and food, but that's not the reason I've gone there in the first place.

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i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service
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