alt Hacker News>It's not just the loss of the craft and the problem-solving challenge and whatever else. It's the loss of making.
It's the loss of understanding. When you make something, you gain a deeper appreciation for the nuance of all that is required to breath life into it. When you outsource understanding to another (agent, contractor, w/e), you're losing the nuanced understanding of the creation.
>After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of doing things. Isn't that doing a thing?
This feels like the difference between putting together an ikea futon and building a hand-hewn table from logs. The fidelity of your understanding is different depending on how deeply you're engaging. But not felling and drying your own timber doesn't mean you can never make something from dimensional lumber.
I'd take the author's word "making" to mean something more like "having enough understanding of the implementation of the task, that you could recreate the output without recourse to the same set of tools".
Tested against their examples:
>I had a new front deck put in [by a contractor]
As a consequence of this addition, did you learn enough about decks so that you could you reproduce this feat if no contractor were available? If no, you didn't make the deck. If yes, you were probably watching/helping the whole time, and you can claim (at least partial) makesmanship.
> any more than using a hammer to drive nails does.
If you didn't have access to the hammer, could you still accomplish the task of attaching two boards together with a nail? Likely yes, use a rock. It's harder, but the understanding of driving the nail is transferable to other implements.
> What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I hammered it.
This one contradicted his compiler example. He says that he did write the Fibonacci program, even if the AI-powered compiler translated it to assembly. So by similar reasoning, you can claim you hammered a nail with an AI hammer, so long as you understood the aspects of hammering which the AI took care for you to such a degree that you could reproduce the effects even in the absence of the AI hammer.
The crux of the tension is around "what did you learn from the implementation of this task". If you learned enough to reproduce the objective without the assistance of AI (perhaps much slower), then you can claim the high fidelity understanding that came from making. If you didn't internalize anything, and the AI/contractor managed complexity on your behalf, then the output was commissioned, not made.
I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage. It does seem like a bifurcating event where some people are going to net gain understanding of their world due to these new tools, while others will net lose understanding.
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> I think where people get worked up about this, is that it's not easy to tell what understanding other folks are taking away from their AI usage.
Alongside understanding, you also loose taste and perception. You can still say whether some things is good or bad, especially if you interact with it, but you can no longer articulate why. And with perception loss, you can no longer preempt a bad situation as you lose your awareness of things.
So for you a car may be a vehicle that you drive around. But for a mechanics it's a much complex system. When something doesn't work, you will lack the vocabulary to express what's wrong. And even when everything works, you may not be able to explain how.
The thing is, LLM are very buggy translators. Agents in software development help because they provide a way for LLMs to verify their output. But correctness is very hard to express. OK for a simpler task, but not really for a complex systems. Just like fluency in a foreign language is not about knowing the rules of grammar and a lots of words, but also knowing the idioms and other figure of speech.
I entirely agree with this take. I've used LLMs for "making purposes" in two fundamental scenarios so far: to write code in languages I'm not 100% familiar with, and to help with circuit design.
In the code scenario, I most likely won't go over the final result: for various reasons, I often lack the interest and drive to understand the nuts and bolts of it. So I'll just try to assess whether it's sufficiently good for my goals, and then move on.
But in the circuit design scenario, I only use it as a "technical expert" to bounce ideas back and forth with, and to explore concepts I don't fully grasp. I use it as a sort of ELI5 machine, and never ever ask it to do something for me - just to explain.
The fundamental difference in outcome is that I remember next to nothing about the code, and have no feeling of "ownership" over it, nor do I feel proud or care about it at all.
Conversely, I am incredibly proud of the PCBs and circuits I design, even if technically some parts of it came straight out of AI recommendations. I really feel like I did the job, and AI was just a helper tool to get the tough concepts untangled quicker in my head.
Ultimately I think if you delegate 100% of the work to AI, and don't care enough to use its output to at least learn something, it's only natural that you'll never feel any connection to it, let alone any sense of ownership over its output. Being the prompt author is simply not enough. That's why I think you hit the nail on the head there: deeply understanding the output is the key, I just couldn't put my finger on it before, and now I can. Thanks for that.