"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real."

Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also come to understand "how writers think"?

I love the later description of writing as a "special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and [enormous amounts of] labor", where “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception" (according to Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?

My current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in on it

While the same people in the same comments say it’s fine to replace programming with it

When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software development has none…

Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code.

However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains.

Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).

The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way.

Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.

I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen).

> Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?

Absolutely. I think like a Python programmer, a very specific kind of Python programmer after a decade of hard lessons from misusing the freedom it gives you in just about every way possible.

I carry that with me in how I approach C++ and other languages. And then I learned some hard lessons in C++ that informed my Python.

The tools you have available definitely inform how you think. As your thinking evolves, so does your own style. It's not just the tool, mind, but also the kinds of things you use it for.