Ask HN: Why do people say "I built it" when we should say "Claude built it"?
It's just something I've been wondering about. Everyone says, “I built it,” but really we should say, “Claude built it for me,” or maybe, “I asked Claude to build this.”
Don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Claude, or any other LLM. It is a tool. The person using it is still the creator.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tool
tool (noun)
1a: a handheld device that aids in accomplishing a task
2a: something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession
> a scholar's books are his tools
2c: a means to an endThe ONLY way I can agree with someone saying it is not, is only if that person also only programs in machine code. Java basically writes itself after all.
If the LLM is doing most of the design and implementation, you didn't make anything. You had an idea, and other people's work made that idea a reality.
The headline should be 'Executives cause 100 days worth of TV production re-work'.
I had Claude build me some TamperMonkey scripts here and there, I don't claim I wrote those.
I do claim I built my side project with it being mostly vibe coded, because I've steered, planned and guided every aspect of that site regardless of how it was built. I own it, I maintain it. Months of building on the side.
The opposite of your example:
People get cross if you write "OpenAI's agents hacked Hugging Face", even though the logs demonstrate the agent was cheating and knew it was cheating.
Such discussions are not limited to AI. "We won the World Cup!" like they were in that football team, "We went to the moon!" like they were even born yet when the last Apollo mission returned to Earth, "Musk's new spaceship/car" like he's the developer rather than the owner.
When Claude gets to the point that you can build a functional equivalent of Adobe Creative Suite, with one and only one prompt, then "Claude built it for me" might become appropriate. But we're not there yet. There is still significant work that goes into shaping a software package even when people vibe code.
The big risk here is being hired and getting stuck in such a manual role.
Plenty of people will boicott a thing just because AI is involved. If I'm talking to a colleague or friend I might do exactly what you suggest, I might say things like "I had Claude do x". I don't mind that at all. But if I'm publishing a website or app or something I'm not gonna put a big "AI Generated" sticker on it simply because there's no benefit, and might have drawbacks.
If you ask Claude to “Build me a CRM application.” and then walk away for 9 hours, then you should say Claude built this. That’s giving the technology and the time we live in the credit it deserves. A lot people made that possible.
If you work with Claude to create something during your days, nights, and weekends, then you created it. No one has the right to tell you how to use the tools at your disposal. Just like an artist shouldn’t be told they didn’t create something by using Photoshop vs. using a piece of charcoal sourced from a fireplace on a piece of parchment.
If you have a shower thought for a particularly novel concept that no one has thought of and then use Claude to bring that concept to reality, then you absolutely get credit for the creation. Who gives a shit how it was coded. The only ones that will care how it was coded will be the jealous ones that didn’t think of the concept themselves.
Blaming AI is also nuanced as well. Just like blaming a company for layoffs vs. not blaming the CEO by name. Just like if AI deletes everything vs. why the hell did you run AI on production systems. If you’re well liked, then AI takes the blame, if not, then you’re getting shitcanned for being boneheaded enough to use AI anywhere near important data.
I did that.
I don't really think these questions are useful.
To make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.
Say I don't think Steve Jobs personally built the iPhone or Walt Disney built Disneyland. But that's still how we describe the human that was the core individual in making these things happen.
I would even argue that giving credits to the workers in movies or video games is the exception not the rule.
You could say that, and it would be technically true, but it's not how humans talk.
The "I" comes from the will to act, not so much the process implemented to carry out the action.
"I destroyed the world" is accurate, even when the nuclear weapons you used actually did the destroying (no human can physically destroy a world). It is your will to destroy the world that you speak of when you say "I".
An LLM has no will, it's the tool that was used to exercise the will of the person building the thing.
"I cooked dinner", no, the stove and the microwave did that. True, but it would be a silly way to talk about it.
Would I have built the thing without Claude? If not, I'll retain some credit and leave some credit to Anthropic's team for the help.
I never would have said that Turbo Pascal built the application. I'd not say that any compiler builds an finished application, but it's merely a tool along the way.
The same should be true of AI. It took a person to come up with the prompt "On a dark desert highway, Cool Whip and a Bear", even if the image was generated AI.
I just dont understand question, it does not matter whether you typed code or agent did. Application is owned by you no?
These tools are more advanced :) but they are still just tools.
The natural evolution of https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-....
More complex projects are still human built as the models require steering, but that will change in the near future as well as I think good software design can be RL'd to the models.
And if your manager is involved in the day to day coding of <whatever> then absolutely s/he has a right to say s/he (and others) built it. I used to be a very hands-on engineering manager (pair-programming they call it, these days) at Apple - I always used to say "My team and I".
Well, that's what I do, anyway.
Claude (and LLMs in general) takes an input and generates an output as a general purpose tool.
A few years ago I would have handled a request from upper management to my department that would need new software to fulfill by writing up such a description and then assigning it to one of the programmers in my department to implement.
I certainly would not then go around saying I built that solution.
Nowadays it is quite possible that in that situation I'd give that exact same written request to an LLM.
I don't see how I could now reasonably say that I did build the solution, since the only difference is in who/what I gave my problem description to.
The real answer is that we have a culture based on heuristics that working code and coherent text equal to effort and brains. It is now possible to invest nearly-zero effort and put your name on LLM output for internet points or professional gain, so people do, and then come up with justifications for why it's OK to bend the truth.
Of course, you can use AI tools while retaining creative control, but most of the "I made this" projects we see on HN aren't that. They're people discovering a "cheat" button in the zero-sum game for attention on the internet. And it just wouldn't be getting as many upvotes / views with a full disclaimer.
Maybe it can’t build something without an “I”?
AI attracts the bloggers, the loudmouthed and the socially dominant. It attempts to turn intellectual endeavors into a popularity contest again.
Fortunately it fails on many fronts, but that is the goal.
You didn't create it. Claude generated it based on ingesting source code of various licenses without adhering to said licenses.
That's me for like 3-4 years or so b4 AI. Did i really build anything? IDK tbh.
Code was like max 20% of the time.
Same thing with Claude really.
“No, teacher. Claude is just a tool. I wrote that.”
Many people in these comments will apparently agree with the student.
There is unspoken context that people assume when conversing with each other. AI has made assuming that context dangerous. People who want to play semantics to mislead others are obviously lying. Those who acknowledge that extra context is needed now are not.
AI isn’t going back in the tube, and there are plenty of significant issues to discuss, but these kind of topics feel like “kids these days”.
"I've" been writing a compiler. It's pretty good - comparable to C++/gcc/clang in speed and has some (IMHO) nice features, amongst which:
- it doesn't use header files, for library imports it reads the DWARF to get method/funciton signatures and types
- it has the nicest interface I've ever seen for a GPU/CPU interconnect, just one line of code identifies the bit to convert to a GPU kernel, and I'm working on getting rid of that too.
- the same language is used for the GPU and CPU, so the below is a full and complete GPU-driven Mandelbrot program. On my M4 Max MBP it operates in 0.7ms on the GPU, 94ms on all-cores (another option it can do) or 432ms on a single core.
#use "Stdio.xc"
#use "Par.xc"
#define W 2048
i32 main(void)
{
u32 total = 0;
par mandel :reduce(+ total)
{
for (u32 i in 0..W * W)
{
float cx = (float)(i % W) * (3.0f / W) - 2.0f;
float cy = (float)(i / W) * (3.0f / W) - 1.5f;
float x = 0.0f;
float y = 0.0f;
u32 k = 0;
while (k < 256 && x * x + y * y < 4.0f)
{
float xt = x * x - y * y + cx;
y = 2.0f * x * y + cy;
x = xt;
k = k + 1;
}
total = total + k;
}
}
printf("%u iterations\n", total);
return 0;
}
- Currently working on automatic division of labour between any GPUs on the same machine, initial results are promising, and then onwards to GPUs on the LAN.
- Binding of the GPU happens at runtime, not compile-time, meaning the best possible execution path will be chosen (by measuring, then persisting the measurement so it doesn't have to run again for the same parameters) on any given machine, be that an NVIDIA, AMD, or Apple platform, or a WGSL-based browser.
Anyway. Brief synopsis over with. The point is that a lot of the above things are my own ideas, there isn't really anything out there (that I know of) that parses DWARF for data. There's no language out there (that I know of) that has such a clean interface between CPU and GPU, Runtime measurement and efficiency management built in, with persistence, complete independence from vendor tools. Etc. etc.
This isn't just a "hey Claude, build me a compiler, I want it to be rad, yo" minimal-effort thing - I've spent more than half a year doing this, there's been a lot of effort involved, steering, redirecting when things don't pan out, discussing, overrriding the recommended path in the name of future goals, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I've written compilers before, literal decades ago (I'm retired now), so I know just what a huge job it was to take on, and I'd never have attempted it myself if the LLM wasn't there to do the grunt work, but there's still a lot of "me" in this. My vision. My direction. My time.
What I have previously done is say "I" wrote the compiler (though that's been too subtle in the past) so I now tend to say "I wrote a compiler (full disclosure: with Claude)". And then I ignore the people who get upset about the LLM thing, you know, like water off a duck's back.
And ”i built X” or ”i did Y” is a well known clickbaity title that produces good conversion rates on any platform