alt Hacker NewsIf all art is derivative then the earlier statement is a tautology.
People still call things other people do novel. There's clear social proof that humans do things that other humans consider novel. Otherwise the word would probably not exist.
Just today I wrote a python program that did not resemble anything I'd written before, nor had I seen anything similar. I had to reason it out myself. That passes thr test that the original comment set.
Your threshold for "resemble" is obviously quite high, which is fair, but assuming that you're an encultured programmer your python code represents other people's python code. It might be doing something novel, but that thing it's doing is interacting or in response to, or otherwise relative to existing concepts you learned or saw elsewhere. All art is derivative, we can do things other people haven't done before but all of it derives from the works of others in some way.
Anyway, I've coded all kinds of wacky shit with claude that I guarantee nobody has implemented before, if only because they're stupid and tedious ideas. They can't all be winners, but they were novel, and yet claude code implemented them as confidently as if they were yet another note taking app. They have no problem handling novel ideas, and although the novel ideas in this case were my own, its easy to see how finding new ideas could be automated by exploring the combinatorial space of existing ideas.