But you can move a layer up.

Instead of pouring all of your efforts into making one single static object with no moving parts, you can simply specify the individual parts, have the machine make them for you, and pour your heart and soul into making a machine that is composed of thousands of parts, that you could never hope to make if you had to craft each one by hand from clay.

We used to have a way to do this before LLMs, of course: we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.

Even the person making an object from clay is (probably) not refining his own clay or making his own oven.

> we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.

I think this makes a perfect counter-example. Because this structure is an important reason for YC to exist and what the HN crowd often rallies against.

Such large companies - generally - don't make good products. Large companies rarely make good products in this way. Most, today, just buy companies that built something in the GP's cited vein: a creative process, with pivots, learnings, more pivots, failures or - when successful - most often successful in an entirely different form or area than originally envisioned. Even the large tech monopolies of today originated like that. Zuckerberg never envisioned VR worlds, photo-sharing apps, or chat apps, when he started the campus-fotobook-website. Bezos did not have some 5d-chess blueprint that included the largest internet-infrastructure-for-hire when he started selling books online.

If anything, this only strengthens the point you are arguing against: a business that operates by a "head" "specifying what they want" and having "something" figure out how to build the parts, is historically a very bad and inefficient way to build things.

And therein lies the crux: some people love to craft each part themselves, whereas others love to orchestrate but not manufacture each part.

With LLMs and engineers often being forced by management to use them, everyone is pushed to become like the second group, even though it goes against their nature. The former group see the part as a means, whereas the latter view it as the end.

Some people love the craft itself and that is either taken away or hollowed out.

This is really what it’s about.

As someone that started with Machine Code, I'm grateful for compiled -even interpreted- languages. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work that I do, nowadays, in Machine Code.

I’m finding it quite interesting, using LLM-assisted development. I still need to keep an eye on things (for example, the LLM tends to suggest crazy complex solutions, like writing an entire control from scratch, when a simple subclass, and five lines of code, will work much better), but it’s actually been a great boon.

I find that I learn a lot, using an LLM, and I love to learn.

Yes, but bad ingredients do not make a yummy pudding.

Or, it's like trying to make a MacBook Pro by buying electronics boards from AliExpress and wiring them together.

It's more like the chess.com vs lichess example in my mind. On the one hand you have a big org, dozens of devs, on the other you have one guy doing a better job.

It's amazing what one competent developer can do, and it's amazing how little a hundred devs end up actually doing when weighed down by beaurocracy. And lets not pretend even half of them qualify as competent, not to mention they probably don't care either. They get to work and have a 45 min coffee break, move some stuff around in the Kanban board, have another coffee break, then lunch, then foosball etc. Ad when they actually write some code it's ass.

And sure, for those guys maybe LLMs represent a huge productivity boost. For me it's usually faster to do the work myself than to coax the bot into creating something acceptable.