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Comment by artisinal | Hacker News Reader

Instructing a computer via direct instructions versus via a prompt. I believe the line between this will become vague in the future.

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Does paying someone on Fiverr to draw something for you make you an artist?

Is a movie director an artist?

A more apt comparison would be the producer role (not the executive type, I mean the Project Manager type of roles). And to be honest, I've seen some amazing music A&R being the reason an album is a masterpiece without ever pushing a button or playing an instrument. But none of them would call themselves musicians.

It's creating a pizza but just using a tool called grubhub.

Or is it more like creating machine code but using a tool called a compiler? If you've ever made anything with AI you know it by default generates things that aren't ideal. You still have to go in and debug, make the UI better, think of more elegant ways to present things. The fact that you're focused on those issues instead of tediously finding the block of code and maybe tediously looking up ways to fix / make it better is probably an overall good thing in the long run. We've lost the ability to code in assembly I'm not sure that's made software or life worse even if coders as a group are in all likelihood less intelligent these days.

In your analogy maybe it's more like creating a pizza except you didn't have to make the cheese, grind up the flour, go find the water in a stream somewhere, grow the tomatoes yourself, butcher the animal for the meat, etc.

You can throw away the compiler and the developer who created the software will still understand how it works. You can't say the same about someone who used an LLM who would need an LLM to continue working on the project and understand how it works. If the tool understands the code better than you and can't continue without it, you have essentially given up ownership.

The only caveat with my statement is that there are different degrees in which you can involve an LLM in your project but I mean if you are using it to write the majority of your code.

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