> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.

Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.

I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.

> For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

The crux is here somewhere.

A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone.

Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.

The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell.

As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.

If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote?

Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.

The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.

Very well framed.

A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools people have shared in personal finance communities.

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

One can reason by analogy here.

In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers.

Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc.

When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.

Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!

It's more akin to someone commissioning a piece of art, where they describe the piece in varying detail and then it's the responsibility of the artist to see it through, perhaps deciphering ambiguities in the p̴r̴o̴m̴p̴t̴ commission brief.

If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt pride in that.

I think that's fair for certain one-shot generations. For example, sending off a single prompt to an image or music generator and just accepting the output.

But I think most of this stuff is iterative, multi-turn. You type a thing in, see what comes back, and then repeat until you have something that satisfies your desire.

Taking the manager analogy. If you spent 30-minutes writing up a draft spec, waited for the outputs, had a review meeting where you provided good feedback, and then repeated that cycle until the product was done... Again, I think that manager (assuming, of course, that their feedback was useful) should feel some pride in shaping that output!

Taking the art commission approach, you go back and forth with the artist until you have what you want. Should you feel pride?

I think it's much closer to the art commission than it is to a manager who is managing humans, the constraints of the business, customers, etc.

Maybe a movie producer is a better analogy?

Some artists use a brush, but others use a chisel.

And then there's the bullshit artists.

Just because we never had the option of a chisel before doesn't mean all chiselers are bullshit artists.

Back when image-gen was made widely available (2023ish, feels like eons ago), there were people who took genuine satisfaction with their art prompting skills. It did come off as a bit cringe though: https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/s/KxwhqJ5hrU

That thread is hilarious. They update the model and the guy thinks his art skills has improved. Something to consider when someone tries to tell you prompting is a "skill"...

It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.

What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.

Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.

What sense of pride an accomplishment do you get from using a library, or a high level language? You didn't write that code, you didn't hand translate into processor opcodes, etc. There are a million man hours of other people's work involved in making a simple python script run.

Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you feel accomplishment?

Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.

I think most people feel pride when they put effort into doing something challenging and in return achieve a good result. You can use high level languages and libraries and still put effort into something that is challenging, thus feeling a sense of pride. Of course, they may feel more pride if they achieve the same result without libraries, or in a more challenging language.

Prompting an LLM neither requires comparative effort nor is comparatively challenging, thus it's would be odd to feel a sense of pride from any associated outcomes.

I cannot believe this even requires an explanation.

Developing a functional app that meets your needs with an LLM takes it's own kind of skill, and is substantially more difficult if you can't recognize when the machine is steering your architecture in the wrong direction. It takes actual, real work. It's certainly a completely different kind of work than writing most of the code yourself, but so is using Java when compared to hand writing x86 opcodes.

Prompting an LLM to produce good code isn't a lot of work for you. Writing hex without an assembler or compiler would be a lot of work for you.

People have ideas, and now they have better tools to turn those ideas into reality. They aren't doing it like you would do it, but they're getting it done all the same, getting their needs met, and enjoying the ride.

Maybe just let people have fun, and when they report that they are in fact having fun... believe them.

I'm not saying people can't have fun, I'm saying it's a misplaced sense of pride that gives me the ick when I sense it in others. I see plenty of people who readily disclose that their thing they "built" was just slopped together by an LLM and this is perfectly okay, because they aren't trying to take credit for accomplishments that they didn't put in the expected effort for.

The difference between the skill & effort required to build vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude different. If it took just as much effort, people would just do it by hand anyways.

I think “build vs prompt” is a false binary that frames the argument badly.

There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.

I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.

Yeah, there's something pathetic about being proud of something you didn't actually get challenged by making. Like, I love building Lego sets. It's relaxing, it's fun, and I enjoy having the completed model to put on a shelf and look at. But I would never in a million years say I was proud of those Lego models, or that I had a sense of accomplishment. That wouldn't be merited.

That's a poor analogy, because the intention is orders of magnitude greater on those things than with an LLM. You still need the intention to write Python instead of C, or C instead of assembly. You need an insignificant amount of intention for LLMs, which will happily spew code even for the worst, most incomplete or nonsensical commands.

Don’t think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating computer problem. For people that aren’t technical, computers are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if you’re trying to get something to work in a particular way.

1. There exists some X that you wish existed, but does not

2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists

3. You took even a tiny action towards #2

Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real world; this is the same thing in the small.

Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?

Yeah, they created a team that accomplished something (or a team that created a team), so it's well-deserved.

I guess that's why I burned out as a manager: I do not get a sense of accomplishment when my team achieves something

> Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM?

I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.

He was so excited when he got something to work he called me immediately.

I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access to Claude. ;-)

I'm a professional software engineer and even I get excited about having an ai vibe out some throwaway software for me (two recent examples - a personal recipe site I never made time for and a video game skill tree build tool that isn't worth the time it would have taken to build).

As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!

That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.

Amen. I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get a sense of accomplishment from authoring software.

I think there's a spectrum between simply writing a prompt and generating slop and using AI in a loop over many hours/days/weeks to produce something that works the way you want it to. I get a great sense of accomplishment from doing the second, and I pretty much refuse to do the first, except only in the most ephemeral of cases.

After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt a quantum of accomplishment.

But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.

However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."

Who gets a sense of accomplishment from cheering for their home team?

You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of

Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value

Do you think people in product design never feel a sense of accomplishment or something?

Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.

Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that with the requirements to the extents possible"?

It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

When I make things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide. It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make. That's borderline condescending and pitiful.

But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too. But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this? Makes no sense.

[delayed]

For people totally new, it can be partially understood, just as i was ecstatic having a tool create something on a computer for me in my early days.

For anybody else thought, I get that a LLM is a regression (npi) where you don't have to learn or understand anything .. therefore the personal growth value is moot (except the alleged sales if the person tries to use LLM to create a side business).

For actual devs it's disheartening and caused me real grief seeing how many of them were happy not thinking anymore.

I posit that there are people who get a sense of accomplishment from operating their laundry machine.

And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the jackpot on a slot machine.

Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists.

A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience indicates that this is true.

Sounds like the user could just ammend the software to his need with the LLM, but instead of sending that update to the maintainer with a pull request, just keep it to himself, to the users version.

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special.

As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.

> We almost need like ... noncanonical software?

You mean some modern version of vb or php?

That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.

...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the software can edit their own software and make local modifications that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...

...we can dream though, can't we?

An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily

There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily

> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?

I think no answers are needed.

If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing.

If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out.

There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.

I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.

Why not?

If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well.

You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters.

This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed code, it's already been done.

> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.

I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be able to justify the time for previously.

Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet.

We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.

Huh? The difficulty and the cost was stopping them before. It was really difficult, took a ton of time and money, and you had to deal with another person.

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts.

It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.

Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in, lets say -- word.

I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party."

If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?

Copy-pasting is not programming, no more than clicking the save button is. But text expansion may be seen as such, especially when it involves dynamic elements (like current date and time). It may not be a clean delineation but, IMO, it's the difference between writing a recipe and doing the dish. Copy-pasting twice is making a dish. Creating a button that let the computer do it is writing a recipe.

it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems.

maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.

This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.

If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming? Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the tools you have.

Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.

Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation, cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,) including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians… the ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor involved reflects that. It’s a real shame that some of the people that contribute most to what makes a game great are often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the “lazy devs.” ;)

the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.

Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.

The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.

Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.

Films aren’t open open to random contributions by casual volunteers. It’s not about iPhones.

"You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism.

Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.

Professionals are professional because someone pays them, that is all.

The word has other meanings, too ;) E.g. "professional conduct" isn't one that is paid for:

1a. of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession

1c.1. characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession

3. following a line of conduct as though it were a profession

Professionals can be unprofessional, and amateurs can show professionalism, but only one gets paid.

Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism.

But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.

> So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using

No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their output worth something.

This is the meaning of "When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie."

There's nothing elitist about it.

I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you didn't create anything.

Art isn't craftsmanship.

You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917.

You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool.

You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa.

You can also be popular without any or both of these.

There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.

This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose.

Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras.

The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?

> sense of pride and accomplishment

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

> What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much accomplishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness. They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.

It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.

Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?

Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.

But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.

Hope all your programs are written in machine code. Wouldn’t want to be proud of compiler output.

I mean yeah? Wouldn't you be more proud of your ability to write a program in machine code than you would in assembly? Or more proud of assembly than of C? Or more proud of C than of Python?

Each stage takes greater effort, effort which creates skill. Those hard-earned skills are accomplishments to be proud of.

When LLMs are remotely comparable to compilers, your analogy might hold water. But in the world of today, it holds none.

And I’m sure ctoth’s non-coder friends will be just devastated to hear that some random online account is embarrassed because they’re proud of a little app they created for fun.

Sure, you can feel proud of whatever you wish.

But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.

lol, you’re literally talking about non-coders that GGGP said they know. No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be impressed.

> No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be impressed.

That actually happens all the time on Show HN these days.

is there a list somewhere that i can check what i am allowed to be proud of and what i am not allowed to be proud of?

edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?

No, but come on. If you insert a computer into your brain and wake up tomorrow speaking German, would you be proud you could speak German? Wouldn't you rather work diligently to learn the language and be proud of that effort?

Depends on why the person is wanting to be able to speak German.

If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain computer did for you.

But there are many other reasons to want to be able to speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a new market to great success without having to rely on the German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and without wasting years to learn German on his own when all he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a goal to him.

Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.

And even though the computer is doing something for the person, they are leveraging that for something that they feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that was only possible thanks to the existence of the German speaking skills of the computer).

Absolutely -- why on earth would I spend more time and effort than I have to?

Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.

Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?

would i? no.

would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.

Alright, we’re each entitled to our opinions on the matter.

I get where you're coming from, but for completely non-technical people, it seems to me the more precise analogy is not "building" but "ordering online". Or hiring someone to do something for you.

If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?

That's a better analogy than my dumb drawing one. You can be happy you got your pizza and you can enjoy the taste but it is not an accomplishment to be proud of.

It's mostly that how much you decide to involve AI as a spectrum. To extend to the pizza analogy, I feel like you're telling me that because I used dough that I bought at the store, I shouldn't be proud of the pizza I made, even though I made the sauce and cut the pepperoni and the sausage and baked it myself on a peel covered with cornmeal. That's not the same as just ordering it on DoorDash.

Agreed there are nuances, but in the context of this conversation about TFA, the suspicion is that this is mostly on the "100% AI" side of dial. There's also a "high volume, low quality" aspect to the PRs, as evidenced by the fact that the bots (or humans) don't read or follow the repo's contribution guidelines.

The very concept of "reverse centaur" implies a balance towards the "order pizza online" side of the equation.

The pizza analogy smuggles in this idea of cheep/mass-produced. I'm talking about blind people who can now prompt their way to an accessibility mod for their favorite game, the sort of thing which literally would have never been written before. How you know it wouldn't've been written is by counting the accessibility mods pre and post LLM.

Now generalize this. Every tiny community, every person with a disability, everybody for whom the default software doesn't work right? Can now change it specifically for them. Not add peperoni, that's far too low-dimensional to capture what is happening. Actually build their own interface, be able to use something they simply didn't have access to before, and critically not depend on another programmer (there are like a dozen of us blind ones!) to build something for them.

It's not about cheap. It's about ordering vs building. If you tell an architect and a bunch of workers to build you a house, even if you pick some details and make some choices, it's them that are building the house, not you.

You can feel happy about the result, you can find the house useful, but you shouldn't feel a sense of building accomplishment, because you didn't build anything.

With AI & apps there's less friction, because you don't even have to hire another human being, it's just prompting. In that sense, it's definitely closer to ordering food from an app.

In any case, in the context of TFA, there's also a sense of low quality, cheaply made. The bots making the PRs aren't reading the contribution guidelines, so that's low quality all by itself. Drowning a human reviewer with a mass of PR is also a low quality way of contributing.

People are very proud of their prompts I guess

It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce

So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot, buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken.

I don’t want software written by plebs.