I see a bit of a split in people in creative roles of all kinds (and this is something I had noted before LLMs made the contrast more stark). some people get into it because they like the process of making the thing that they are making (in whole or in part). Others get into it because they have a thing that they want to exist in the world but no-one else has made it (I would also split this into people who just want the thing, or people who want to make something that crosses many domains and so want custom things that will fit into the whole). The former group tend to react with revulsion to automation, because it removes the part they like (though it may depend on what part is automated: most people will find some part of their work necessary but tedious). The latter are usually much more willing to embrace it, because it's the end result that they care about moreso than the process.

Have you seen how people use Fruity Loops nowadays? We’re already halfway there if you compare that to using an AKAI S9000 or MPC2000. And then go back to actually playing an instrument. It’s a gradient and we’re already pretty far along on it :)

Of course they wouldn't, most people who consider themselves engineers aren't engineers. Just look at the job market right now.

It turns out that most people are fine with most of their things being mass-produced cheap stuff from IKEA, Amazon, Temu, etc. - if that means that the cost is significantly lower. The functional benefit of having a door is huge, while the aesthetic benefit of having a beautiful, hand-crafted door is much less important to most people.

Code is not like craftsmanship anyway. The end-user doesn't see any difference whether I use microservices or hexagonal design or react or htmx or how I structure the code or which language I use. All they see is the design and the stability. Since the average developer was terrible at design anyway, the average design output from LLMs is actually an improvement in most cases, even if it always has that generic AI generated look. Stability... was not good before AI either. We have become accustomed to SAP taking 10 seconds to load each component on the page, or Atlassian spewing error messages in your face when you click submit on a ticket. It seems that the aspects that are most valued by our end users are QA and UX, not the craftsmanship of our code.

For musicians there already exists something called Suno: https://suno.com/

Well Lawyers and Judges are doing exactly that: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

And if you look a the dates, the rate at which they are doing it is actually increasing...

I mean more or less to an extent if you expand by what you mean by "out comes". With Amazon, a carpenter can type in any furniture he wants and have it arrive in a matter of hours. Almost equally as magically as well as disruptive. People still use carpenters to make tables, but for the majority, the ease of same-day delivery and cheaper prices are worth it for a sacrifice in personalization and character.

> Yet here we are as software engineers...ready to surrender our craft to mere "prompts" with reckless abandon.

It's worth remembering that, contrary to what HN acts like, software engineers are not uniformly accepting of LLMs. They are still quite controversial in the industry. Now management, on the other hand, is completely sold on the supposed benefits of LLMs. So many engineers feel forced to use them, but it's not enthusiasm on their part which drives them to that.

This but for building houses would be the dream.

Music is already mostly a solved problem unfortunately. Try giving opus a few midi files of your favorite song. It'll write something new in that style with a competence humans would need several years of experience for.