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

That’s not music

And computer-generated code is not code? ;)

That's up to consumers to decide.

If the consumers had criticality they’d be people, not consumers, and we wouldn’t have marketing the way we do now.

Consumers have, overall, rejected AI "art".

But of course, every time consumers voice their preferences is actually "a loud minority" or an "echo chamber" :)

Suno probably puts out better music than most folks who take up music. I mean statistically it has to, right? So once we go with "suno doesn't make music" then we also have to progress to "99 percent of human musicians don't make music", and all us amateur hacks will start objecting lol

[delayed]

The camera just records reality, its by definition sort of neutral artistically speaking, its what it records that matters. Its quite different from this AI music thing, and I would consider it a very difficult task to discuss topics with someone trying to pretend it isn't.

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.

>With Amazon, a carpenter can type in any furniture he wants and have it arrive in a matter of hours. Sure but that doesnt require him to be a carpenter though right? Anybody could do that.

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

There is no such thing as a Software Engineer.

Its just as much as an ego trip...as the Principal Engineers that roam around here, after they survived three layoffs and outputted front end code for six years straight at a FAANG...

Prove me wrong...

"Margaret Hamilton popularized and coined the term 'software engineering' to give the discipline the same legitimacy as hardware engineering".

But oh well, who was she, just the engineer who wrote the software for the Apollo 11. Probably she had no idea what she was talking about.

/s

That's new to me, I didn't know she coined the term. She's the first true "software engineer" then, I suppose. I remember her from that historic photo where she's standing next to a pile of code printed out, a stack talled than her.

Not to be confused with Margaret Hamilton the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the film The Wizard of Oz.

> 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.

My experience has been the opposite, the HN crowd seems more sketical of vibe-coding and not reading a single line of code.

The twitter(x.com) and linkedin crowd has drank the cool-aid and are now swimming in it; Wild posts from FAANG engineers and managers saying they or their engineers dont read any of the code the LLM generates.

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...

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 :)

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.

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.

[delayed]

Might be an art for a few. It's mostly a commercial problem to be solved.

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. The latter are usually much more willing to embrace it, because it's the end result that they care about moreso than the process.