> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it.

To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

It can also apply to tasks where you've offloaded a bunch of work that once would've been done by hand, like "I made this bench using a circular saw."

Where things get hairy even with physical objects is processes like CNC or 3D printers. If you download "Articulated dragon.stl" from a website and press the print button, did you make that? Personally, no. But if you designed your own flexy dragon and printed it, then yes. If you set up a relief carving on a CNC machine or do a perfectly fit inlay, are you making that? Operating these still takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill, but different knowledge and skill from hand woodworking. What if the tools improve and become very easy to operate?

I don't think there's a hard line you can draw. But if there is, it's somewhere between "did everything by hand with no assistance from recently invented tools because those are cheating" and "ordered a sandwich and waited for the finished result to show up."

Plenty of comments already. "I made this" is a reserved concept for one's hands being in the clay. It's different. It is its own experience. And it is different from any other approach toward the end result. That's it.

When Claude Code/Codex first came about I'll admit it depressed me a bit, but I ended up realizing that the "code" part wasn't the part that I actually enjoyed about software engineering.

Instead, what I've been doing for my personal projects has been about designing algorithms with TLA+. I write that by hand, model check and sometimes even prove the properties I think are interesting or useful, and then tell Claude to implement it based on the spec. Usually I still need to correct the generated code but it's a lot less.

Certainly in these cases, I take pride in what I did, because ultimately the "Invisible Hand" always means I'm outsourcing some of the work of a project no matter how involved I want to be. If I build a deck outside, I'm not forging the nails myself, I'm not growing and chopping down the trees for lumber, I'm not designing my own power tools, etc. There's always a level of outsourcing of the work that I don't find interesting or that I don't know how to do, or don't have the resources to do myself.

With software, the parts that I end up feeling proudest of, and this predates widespread use of LLMs, are the algorithms and tricks I come up with to build something. When I figure out a way to avoid a lock, or figure out a way to use less memory, or figure out a way to increase throughput, I'm less concerned with the actual "code", and much more concerned about the "how".

I don't think the "would not exist if I hadn't created it" argument really works. If I delegate a project to someone else, and they do the project, does that mean I did it? In my mind, I could comfortably say I managed it, or I designed some parts of it, but I really couldn't take the credit for actually doing it. You wanted it to be done, so you asked someone to do it.

If anything, I would say your conclusion should be flipped: you didn't really do the "making," but you can still be proud of what you _did_ do: provide direction and a vision for a solution to a problem.

To me there is a difference that lies in the words. E.g. `making` and `producing` both result in the creation of something, but `making` has a more active part while `producing` has a more supervisory part.

This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.

I completely agree with you, because I usually think the same way and I'm more concerned with the result than the path taken to achieve it. But you shouldn't forget that there are definitely people who work the exact opposite way. They don't care at all about having something functional in their hands at the end, because they just enjoy the process of building. And as soon as it's finished, they tear it all down anyway just to start over again with a different approach.

> I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM

You didn't make it

Seems pretty simple in your analogy.

You can be proud of having commissioned a thing… be it landscaping or software… just not for making anything you didn’t.

And of course there are shades of grey in between, depending on how critical you were to the doing.

If all you care about is the end product and not how it's made, then you never become a better person. Your capacity for thinking and solving problems will never grow. You will never be an expert. Experts care about the process.

Of course, you may not care, and that's fine. It's important that people not be delusional about this though. A person with no medical knowledge and an AI will never be as good as someone with prodigious medical knowledge and an AI. The same is true for any profession, whether programming, music, writing, etc.

Many people have a disillusion that an LLM is something more than a tool.

In your examples, you didn’t “make” anything. The person whose work trained the LLM made the work. The landscaper made the lawn. I don’t know how it’s possible to take pride in doing nothing.

I can hire a maid to make my bed for me and tell her how exactly to fluff my pillows and duvet but I would take no pride in that.