I'm just gonna hop in and say: I get it.

If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise.

If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not.

Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding.

The real disconnect seems to be the classic dichotomy: people who see coding as the point and the purpose, vs people who just want an outcome.

And that's fine!

I'm just don't understand why the one camp feels the need to deride the other.

Like Lego, assembly can be fun too, and I don't have to manufacture the individual bricks from scratch just to enjoy assembling them together. But no one doesn't call that building something, similar to your experience.

And sometimes buying a statue can be fun, but nobody calls it building a statue.

Help me out with the metaphor here. Do you think designing and architecting some software, then getting an LLM to write a lot of the code, is the same as buying a computer program from a store?

The better AI gets, the closer it gets, yes.

It really depends how you use it. There's a whole spectrum from "do it yourself" to "get the AI to do everything". Its up to each person, on each project, to decide what amongst all of that work is actually worth human time.

I don't enjoy CSS, so I delegate that to an LLM. Just like I don't like writing assembly by hand, so I delegate that to a compiler. So what?

Why aren't you talking about your new love writing assembly now that you have a compiler?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I noticed.